TransMilenio, the Bus Rapid Transit System (BRTS) in Bogota, the capital city of Colombia, has been hailed as one of the most effective forms of urban development inspiring cities across the world. Extremely popular and widely adopted by city dwellers, TransMilenio serves around two million rides a day.
However, the growing city needed more. The BRTS which started crumbling under the weight of a growing population also became a victim of political warfare. After discussions and debates that lasted years, Claudia Nayibe López Hernández, the first female mayor of Bogota who took charge in 2020, initiated the first line of the Bogotá Metro to solve the problem and to reduce the city’s dependency on diesel buses that cause high emissions. She launched a fleet of 1485 electric buses and expanded the city’s cycling infrastructure.
Lopez’s policies including the renowned Care Blocks and nutrition centres for migrant and refugee children and mothers’ strongly focused on sustainable and inclusive development of the city and its people. Currently a Harvard ALI Fellow and an advisor at the World Resources Institute (WRI), she was in the city recently where she conversed with policymakers, bureaucrats and urban enthusiasts.
Lopez spoke to The Hindu on the similarities between Bengaluru and Bogota, and the challenges and opportunities before the two global cities.
How do you compare Bengaluru and Bogota? How can these cities grow sustainably and inclusively?
Both Bogota and Bengaluru are cities from the global south. We share similar challenges, opportunities, and hopes to have economic growth in a socially inclusive and sustainable manner and to strengthen democracy.
Bogota is a city of 8 million people and there are 12 million people in the larger metropolitan region. Bogota alone accounts for 25% of Colombia’s GDP. I think Bangalore has similar figures.
To develop inclusively and sustainably we need to integrate both the rural and urban development. We need to coordinate with the people and the elected representative of the regions from where the water, energy and food for the urban regions is coming from.
It’s important to decarbonize the economy and start it by decarbonizing public transportation. A multi-modal interconnected mode of transportation based on clean energy and inclusive spaces for people is a huge part of the response to the climate change challenge and the urban productivity challenge.
Both Bogota and Bengaluru are very well known for their problems of traffic. We deal with the same challenge: when people achieve more economic inclusion and income, more of them want to have a private car. For them that’s not even an economic hope, it’s a cultural hope. They see a car as not just a means of mobility, but as a symbol of status, a cultural status of modernisation. We still have that ingrained in our minds, even though it doesn’t have anything to do with real development.
The byproduct of that in the United States was an incredibly unsustainable polluted urban development. If the rest of the world urbanized the same way as the U.S. did we will simply kill this planet in a matter of years.
The technical solution is to build multi-modal, clean, fast affordable public transportation. You may have metro lines, but you also need a bus rapid transit (BRT) system, hopefully electric. Also, you’re going to need preference lanes for feeder buses, hopefully electric too. Also, you’re going to need regional trains that connect the entire region around the city in a more comprehensive way. Bengaluru is the perfect city to have more bikes (bicycles) and dedicated lanes for them.
The city is also the Silicon Valley of India. What Bengaluru as well India needs, is data on how people move, why each person decides a certain mode of transportation, each trip’s origin, destination, cost, time, and so on. The tech industry of Bangalore should provide this information for free to the state, it’s the minimum contribution they could make.
With that information, you can plan and build the most effective multimodal system which can then help with your land use planning.
We should never forget that we share the planet with other living forms. They are as crucial as we are to sustain our planet. They don’t need the metro or buses, but ecosystemic connectors within the city.
How do you view the importance of social and gender inclusion in development?
There is still a large number of people in poverty in India. A third of the population is in poverty in Colombia. So social inclusion in development is very important.
Let’s take the example of the ‘care system’ in Colombia. Women, particularly, are left behind in economic development. One of the things that holds back women is that we, everywhere in the world, have more poverty of time than men. In Bogota, women dedicate seven hours more work per day, but it’s unpaid care work. Care economy accounts for 13% of the GDP of Bogota, 20% of the GDP of Colombia, but it’s unpaid care work 90% of which is done by women and 10% by men. So not surprisingly, those men and women are under poverty. And they cannot contribute to other industries.
To solve this, we took advantage of all the existing social infrastructure such as the schools, health centres, community centres, recreation and cultural facilities. We used these facilities that are near the homes of these unpaid caregivers to get close to them and added some social workers there so that we could provide three types of services.
First of all, to take care of those people that the women are taking care of – children, elderly, loved ones with disabilities, and thereby free up time for those women.
In the same places, we organised spaces and services for the women to have leisure, to access labour opportunities and organizational opportunities for social empowerment.
The third service is to teach all the other members of the family to provide care.
What is your opinion on building more flyovers to solve the city’s traffic woes?
The problem is not that people own a car. But when people intend to do the daily commute during peak hours in an individual car, there is no way we are not going to be congested regardless of how much more infrastructure is built. If you build flyovers saying you don’t have enough surface space, it will be congested in another 10 years, period.
We need to incentivise and teach people to use cars for casual or emergency trips, and not for daily commutes. For the latter, they should use the metro, the BRT, the feeder buses, bikes and other forms of public transportation.
This is not a war against cars. It’s a collective commitment to use multimodal transportation for different types of trips. We need to go from the typical, car-driven avenue of the 20th century to the Green Corridors of the 21st century.
In the case of Bogota, 80% of people don’t own a car. Only 15-17% of the trips in Bogota are done by individual cars. Roughly 50% of the trips are done by public transportation. About 8% are done by bike and 24% of the trips are done by walking. But at least 70% of the public space for mobility is devoted to cars. It’s unfair for almost every other modes.
People who use cars during peak hours need to feel the pressure of the space and price. We could take a leaf out of what they have done in Santiago and charge them tolls. Otherwise, they are not going to be disincentivized.
Better public transportation includes more trips without congestion. Better car infrastructure includes more trips with more congestion. That’s the difference. With the amount of experience, data and lessons we have with 150 years of urbanisation, building more flyovers in the 21st century is a crime.
What are some of the lessons both cities can learn from each other?
Not only Bengaluru, but other Indian cities also, at the moment have a much more gender inclusive public transportation than Bogota. There are exclusive train coaches for women, free bus transport for women and so on. Public transportation in India is by far cheaper, which is fair for people in general and particularly for women who bear high levels of poverty. We are trying to learn from you and include that in our systems.
Where we are probably doing much better is in walkable spaces. Here it’s an adventure to walk on the sidewalks or to try to cross the streets. I’m not claiming Bogota is the best, but our walkable spaces, sidewalks and bike lanes are safer, better designed, inclusive, and highly used.
