Mexico City tries to mitigate its car problem

Along Avenida Insurgentes, a major arterial in Mexico City. This street now includes lanes for cyclists and for a Metrobús BRT line. There is also a well-used sidewalk. Note the electronic sign which features constantly changing messages for drivers to ignore. The current sign reminds drivers that they must yield to pedestrians.

I’ve been in Mexico City twice in the last couple of months, first in mid-January and then in late February. Except for a very brief visit in 2013, these were my first trips to Mexico City in something like twenty-five years.¹ As usual, I was particularly interested in taking a look at new non-automotive transportation facilities. There was a lot to see.

The context is that Mexico City has had a car problem for a long time. It used to be said—back between, say, the 1960s and the early 1990s–that, thanks largely to automobiles, its air quality was the worst in the world. In the 2010s, Mexico City was also sometimes classed as the world’s most congested city mostly because traffic moved so slowly there. As a result, governments have put a great deal of effort into creating alternatives to the automobile, and some of what they’ve done is quite striking. It’s these alternatives that I was mostly interested in.

Map of part of the Mexico City area. Note that the urban area continues quite a way beyond the map, especially to the north, west, and east—Mexico City is, of course, a huge place. The nominal scale of the map is 1:170,000. That’s the scale it would have if printed on an 8-1/2-x-8-1/2-inch sheet of paper. GIS data are derived in part from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap and in part from the files available at the Portal de Datos Abiertos run by Mexico City’s government. I’ve edited all the data. The lines shown for the Mexicable routes (the northeastern teleféricos that are mostly in the state of México) are only approximate; I couldn’t find a premade GIS file or even a trustworthy map of these routes. Note that all the transport routes but the roads are shown with 30% transparency. This means that, when two routes occupy the same (or nearly the same) location, both are visible on the map. When two routes are shown with different colors, you end up with a color mix that (I acknowledge) may be confusing. The map is clickable, enlargeable, and downloadable.

It’s important to note that, despite all the traffic, central Mexico City is, I’m glad to say, full of pedestrians. Sidewalks are found just about everywhere except along freeways, and, while many are in poor shape, they’re often crowded. Major streets are lined with stores that mostly seem to be doing decent business. There are also sidewalk kiosks and itinerant merchants in many places. Much of central Mexico City is, generally, a bustling, “vibrant” place. The pedestrian/car traffic interface is, however, as awkward as it is in most cities of the Global South. Numerous intersections lack traffic lights, and drivers of turning vehicles ignore the laws stating that they must yield to pedestrians. Crosswalks are essentially meaningless.² Part of the problem is surely that there’s the same close relationship between automobile ownership and social class that’s nearly universal in the Global South. As everywhere, wealth comes with privilege. Some well-off people have little sense that they should ever defer to the poor.³

Pedestrians (mostly) waiting to cross an intersection where they theoretically have the right of way. Because the road on the left leads to a freeway entrance, there is a huge amount of traffic, and the wait can last several minutes. Similar situations, of course, occur in the United States as well.

The most costly step that governments have taken to deal with the problem has involved the construction of an elaborate subway system. The first Metro line opened in 1969, and the system has grown quite a lot since then. With approximately 200 route kilometers, it’s now the third largest in the Western Hemisphere (after New York’s and—just barely—Washington’s subways). It also has the third largest number of passengers, nearly three million a day. Only New York and (by a tiny margin) São Paulo have more.⁴ In taking Metro rides in the course of my recent trips, I had the sense that the system has been maintained pretty well. Newer components of the system are state-of-the-art.  It’s true that some of the more-than-fifty-years-old stations and cars were looking their age in small ways. I couldn’t help but notice, for example, that the stone in some of the stairways leading to and from the stations has gotten rather dangerously worn down. There are, however, plans to renovate older stations and to replace the most ancient rolling stock. The subway’s chief problem may be that it covers such a small proportion of the urban area. It barely reaches into México state, which now has a larger population than Mexico City. It doesn’t even cover Mexico City very comprehensively. For example, it doesn’t get anywhere close to Santa Fe, on the city’s western edge, which now has the region’s most important office complex. The Mexico City urban area has well over 20 million people and covers an area with a diameter of more than 100 km in all directions. Its subway system is useful in something like 15% of this area.⁵

The Coyoacán station (1983) on Line 3 of Mexico City’s Metro.

Inside a Line 3 train.

In more recent years Mexico City has also constructed the Metrobús, an elaborate set of BRT routes the first of which opened in 2005. Most of the original lines run along major streets on separate bus-only lanes and stop in middle-of-the-road stations that you prepay to enter; they are similar to the lines in Curitiba and Quito—and Jakarta. There does not seem to be much if any signal preemption, and the buses I was on spent as much time stopping at red lights as in stations, but they are definitely faster and more reliable than traditional buses. The Metrobús network now has seven lines, and there are something like a million passengers a day. (Some routes—the lines to the Airport and along the Paseo de la Reforma—are not really BRT lines though; they don’t have separate lanes or stations. There are also BRT lines in México State called Mexibús lines. I haven’t ridden these and haven’t included them on the map.)

A Metrobús, having just left a station, waiting with other traffic at a red light on Avenida Insurgentes. Note also the minimally protected bike lane.

There is also one more recent infrastructural intervention that’s been quite specifically designed to help people in some of the late-20th-century informal settlements in Mexico City’s periphery. Governments in the Mexico City area (like those in several other Latin American cities, among them Medellín, La Paz, and Rio de Janeiro) have been building overhead cable lines (or aerial trams, teleféricos in Spanish) to peripheral areas. These lines aren’t speedy, and they can’t carry all that many passengers, but they’re surprisingly cheap to build, and they can be faster and safer than their chief competition: privately-run vans and minibuses that must maneuver through traffic on circuitous roads.⁶ Depending on how one counts them, there are now four or five such lines in the Mexico City area. The first (2016), called the Mexicable, was entirely in México state. It joined hilly sections of Ecatepec de Morelos with a major road. More recent teleférico lines all connect to Mexico City’s Metro lines. The two lines (one with a branch) in Mexico City (2021-) are known as cablebuses and are said to be the world’s longest overhead cable lines (they’re 9 and 10 km long).  The cablebús line that I took (ignoring warnings from middle-class Mexicans about venturing into a dangerous part of the city) provided a truly spectacular view of parts of Mexico City’s periphery.

View looking roughly north from Cablebús Line 1. Note how solidly built-up the neighborhoods below are. Many rooms in these dwellings must be windowless. Numerous buildings in hilly areas can only be reached via long stairways.

The city has also done a good deal of pedestrianization. Many streets and plazas in the Centro Histórico are now pedestrian-only, at least most of the time. Some (I’m delighted to report) are also no-smoking. On weekends they attract an astonishing number of visitors.

Pedestrianized Avenida Francisco I. Madero in the Centro Histórico. The red sign on the left announces that smoking is forbidden in the area.

Perhaps the most interesting (although, I’d be the first to admit, probably most marginal) new transportation development has been the growth of facilities for bicycles. Among cities in the Global South, it seems likely that only Bogotá and Sao Pãulo have more bicycle lanes than Mexico City. It’s claimed that there are now more than 300 km of such lanes, although there is a real issue about what should be counted. The term “carril bici” is used not only for well-protected corridors but also for unprotected painted lanes and lanes that cyclists share with buses. (I didn’t include “bús-bici” lanes on the map above.). I wouldn’t say that Mexico City’s bicycle lanes are often crowded, but they do get a fair amount of use. Car drivers (thanks in part perhaps to government advertising campaigns) do to some extent respect cyclists when they’re making turns.

Protected bicycle lane on the Paseo de la Reforma, perhaps Mexico City’s most prestigious street.

Mexico City also has one off-road rail trail that runs roughly north-south, mostly along the foothills in the western side of the city. It replaced a closed railroad to Cuernavaca and is known as the Ciclopista Ferrocarril de Cuernavaca. Parts of it opened in 2004. I visited the trail in two, surely atypical, places. In the first, near Chapultepec Park, there were hardly any users, even on a Saturday afternoon.

The Ciclopista Ferrocarril de Cuernavaca just west of Chapultepec Park.

I also visited the trail as it passes through Nuevo Polanco, where the railway line is still present and where 10 km of the trail have been designated the Parque Lineal FC (“Railway linear park”). The trail here is quite busy (but only for a short distance).

The Parque Lineal FC, an atypical section of the Ciclopista Ferrocarril de Cuernavaca, as it passes through Nuevo Polanco. This is the only part of the Ciclopista where there are separate pedestrian and bicycle lanes. The Museo Soumaya can be seen in the background.

In general, bicycle lanes are most common in central Mexico City. This substantial and diffuse area is the busiest and most congested part of the region. More remote areas, where people tend to be poorer and more dependent on public transportation, have fewer bicycle facilities (although there are exceptions, including some places where there are bicycle lanes leading to Metro stations with bicycle parking facilities).⁷

The logic of building bicycle facilities is clear enough. Bicycles take up a smaller space than automobiles and don’t cause air pollution. Bicycles are also more easily available to poor people than cars. And bicycle lanes are a whole lot cheaper to build than just about any other new infrastructure. The problem, as everywhere, is that bicycling is often perceived (not inaccurately) to be rather dangerous—and also hard work. The fact, however, that so many people turn up for Mexico City’s Sunday ciclovía (where, as in most big Latin American cities, many important streets are closed for bicycle riders) suggests the possibility that cycling really could take off—someday.

Sunday morning ciclovía on the Paseo de la Reforma. Note the sheet being draped across the roadway to prevent cyclists from disobeying a red light. As elsewhere in Latin America, Mexico City’s ciclovía is a labor-intensive event.

While there have been plenty of pollyannaish journalistic articles⁸ claiming that Mexico City was becoming a center of bicycling, the few figures that I’ve seen suggest that the modal shift toward bicycle use has been modest. According to one source, between 2007 and 2017, trips by bicycle grew from 2.0% to 4.7% of all Mexico City trips. This doesn’t seem so bad until you consider that the same source reported that the modal share of car trips rose from 28.7% to 43.6%, while public-transit trips plummeted.⁹ I haven’t been able to find more reliable and up-to-date figures on bicycling in Mexico City. 

One distinctive feature of the geography of the Mexico City region is that most of its population now lives outside the city itself, mostly in the state of México, where, in general, there has been much less energy put into creating alternatives to the automobile than in Mexico City proper. There are many reasons for this. Among them has been the presence in Mexico City of ambitious mayors like current presidential candidate Claudia Sheinbaum and current Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The state of México is the site of two new commuter railroads (one far from finished), but the Metro system barely enters the state. There are plenty of exceptions, but the millions of people living in México state are, in general, poorer than those living in Mexico City. It could be argued that the relative absence of new infrastructure there is a pretty classic case of spatial injustice.

Governments have also tried to deal with Mexico City’s pollution and congestion problems in ways that haven’t directly involved creating alternatives to the automobile. Lead gasoline has been banned. Pollution controls are mandated for new cars. Older vehicles with certain license plate numbers are not allowed to be driven on certain days (the “Hoy no circula” program). There have also been attempts to reduce industrial pollution. Power plants, for example, have been converted from coal to natural gas, and no one has tried to keep obsolete factories operating. But—perhaps unwisely—governments have continued to build new highways and haven’t done anything to prevent the continued dispersal of population and activities or the growth of automobile ownership. Still, as a result of  government efforts, air quality really is much better these days than it was, say, thirty years ago, although one of the reasons you hear less about Mexico City’s air pollution problem in recent years is that places like Beijing and Delhi have demonstrated that air quality can get a lot worse than it’s ever been in Mexico City. There are still frequent pollution alerts.¹⁰ Air pollution was pretty bad on several of the days I was in Mexico City. On the day I left, air quality was also compromised by ash from Popocatépetl Volcano.

And there are still too many cars in Mexico City. Traffic jams are common. On my first trip, an 8-km midday Uber ride from the Airport to my hotel took an hour and a half, spent mostly in stopped or slow-moving bumper-to-bumper traffic on freeways. My Uber driver said there was nothing unusual about this, and, in fact, I couldn’t help but notice that traffic in one direction or the other on a freeway near where I was staying was essentially stopped for much of every weekday. Major city streets are also often just jammed with cars, although traffic usually does manage to move every time a slow-to-change traffic light turns green. Perhaps you don’t hear so much any more about congestion in Mexico City because cities like Lagos and Dhaka have it even worse.

To sum up: the Mexico City’s governments have been trying for several decades to solve the area’s pollution and congestion problems. Much of what’s been done resembles actions in other urban areas. Public transportation has been improved; some streets and squares have been pedestrianized; and bicycle transportation has been encouraged. Furthermore, available fuels have been reformulated; modest limits on driving have been instituted; and industrial pollution has been reduced. It can’t be said that the region’s problems have been solved, but they really have been mitigated, even though the urban area now has many more people and a vastly larger number of cars than it did in earlier decades. Perhaps that’s the most that could have been expected.