The Power and the Money

Departures

With four of us, we will be calling a carshare to take us to the airport. I know, right now “Uber” has become a generic word, the way “Fridgidaire,” “Hoover,” and “Xerox” used to be. Since I dislike the company with a passion, however, I will do my part to insure that it remains a proper noun. “Carshare!”

It is slightly easier than calling a radiocab, I suppose, and it does insure working seat belts in the back. I am of mixed minds, to be frank. In Mexico City there is an upwards redistribution of income, since carsharing drivers tend to be richer.

And I miss taking the subway to and from the airport. It’s an experience that most middle and upper-middle class chilangos avoid, for reason that I do not understand. You do have to traverse the entire terminal from the international area to get to the station, but it isn’t that big a terminal: call it twelve Manhattan blocks, a little over a half-mile. You will also have to change trains at least once, since Line 5 runs a peripheral route down the middle of the Interior Circuit expressway. But unless you’re encumbered with bags or headed beyond the reach of the metro, it’s cheaper and faster than taking a taxi.

So why don’t more people do it? Well, practically, the station interchanges are a major PITA. They are long labyrinths. Not unpleasant, but not efficient. The reason the connections between lines are so ridiculous is that Mexico City, wisely, decided to build its metro on the cheap. Sure, you could have had lines dive under each other with platforms carefully laid out to make transfers quick and easy — the Washington Metro is pretty good in this respect — but building cathedrals to urban transit is not how Mexico City rolls. So other than the first three lines (1, 2, and 3, easily enough) everything is jury-rigged.

The most relevant connection for this post is La Raza, which connects Line 5 (the airport line) to Line 3 (a north-south line that runs through a lot of nice middle class neighborhoods). The damn thing is over a half-mile long (like the airport) but rather less pleasant. The first time you do it you will notice the science museum laid out along the walls, covering the history of the universe. The 78th time you do it, you will start to feel like the transfer has taken you the entire age of the universe. I can see this being a deterrent, but come on. By the time you have memorized the panels on the evolution of the cockroach, you can start people watching instead.

The wildest is Chabacano, which connects lines 2, 8, and 9 in wild mess of tunnels, bridges, and escalators. Up-down up-down up-down, great for kids, less so for commuters. But the brutalist architecture is so cheap that it’s charming. In fact, you might recognize some it: they filmed the subway shootouts in Total Recall there. Click the link. The station really is laid out just like the chase! No directorial tricks; they just had Arnie make the transfer. With people shooting at him.

The weirdest is Ermita connecting Line 2 and the newest Line 12. The corridors zig and zag like a protractor. I have no idea why, but if I had to guess, it was much cheaper than just barreling a straight connection through. Kinda triples the distance.

The best is Zapata. Just take it. Much more interesting stuff on the walls than the science museum at La Raza.

And the longest? Oh sweet Mary mother of God, Atlatilco. It connects Line 8 and Line 12. It goes on forever. I did it precisely once, just to see it. I will not voluntarily do it again.

I could go on.

Anyway, the long La Raza connection is not why few people take the airport line. Nor is it crowding. (Want to go to Condesa? Line 5 to Line 9. Annoying transfer; you gotta climb a lot of escalators. But it is still crazy fast and there is very little crowding, even by D.C. standards.)

No, it is just that too many upper middle class chilangos still feel weird on the metro. You know, people selling you candy and phone chargers and music CDs. (I do not understand that market.) Which is too bad.

But which will soon change. Mexico City is building a new airport right outside the city. The talk is of extending Line B to it ... but the real project will be an express train running from Observatorio, where the new commuter rail from Toluca will come in, out to the new airport. It will not be part of the Metro system (although it will connect to it) and it will cost a lot more than the current 29¢. So the middle class will take it, but the poor will not, and so transit will remain class segregated.

It also looks like the airport might be open before the airport connections, which is going to be a Godawful mess, but that is another story.

The beginning of the end of parking?

Mexico City is creaking under the number of cars on its streets. For details, see this post. So what to do about it?

The metro is already a modern miracle and is being expanded. Notably more middle-class people appear to be riding it. It should be expanded faster, but there are practical limits to how fast that can be done. 

Road-pricing is a distinct possibility, but would be politically, administratively, and technically extremely difficult in this town. Mexico City is much nicer than it was, but it still ain’t London. Although they have managed to close off major streets in the city center on Sunday.

Which leaves you with ... limit parking! In a brilliant move, the Ciudad de México just moved to limit parking spaces in new residential construction. Current regulations mandate minimums, on the assumption that people will drive no matter what. (For offices, it was one spot for more-or-less every 300 square feet.) The newest office tower downtown, for example, has more than 3,000 parking spaces.

Now there are no minimums. The maximum is three per apartment (which is rather high) or one per 300 square feet of office space. (See pages 7-8 of the new regulation here.) You can build more, but you need to pay a tax. 

The literature says that this should discourage driving. European cities have de facto parking limits, and they do indeed have fewer auto trips than American ones. The question for Mexico is whether this is enough to keep all of the future middle class from commuting by automobile. The question for the rest of North America is whether this policy can or should be emulated.

Thoughts?

More subway geekery, Mexico City edition

I know, up north the Senate is debating ... uh ... something that might impoverish and sicken millions of people, while the President burns through every norm we have left. But I am south of the border, so let’s talk about subways.

Back in 2014, we blogged about the Line 12 mess. (The above station is on Line 12 where my boy goes for soccer practice.) The problem was that the city decided to use steel rails and overhead catenary power lines instead of rubber tires and third rails. The trains proved too heavy for the tracks, 15 kilometers of which had to be replaced. In addition, curves on the elevated structure had to be widened and the camber reduced from 160 millimeters to 100. It was a design mess, but as I argued in the post, the Mexican government actually comported itself fairly well in the aftermath.

The question is, why did they decide to switch designs? This wasn’t the first steel-wheeled line constructed in Mexico City, but Line A runs out the eastern suburbs mostly on a straight ground-level right-of-way in the middle of a freeway. Moreover, Line A was originally designed to be a light rail that would link into the end of the Metro but not really be part of it. Its cars are a full 30 centimeters narrower than regular metro cars and weigh 88 tons less. (The history of Line A can be found here.) In other words, the decision to build Line 12 with overhead wires and steel rails had nothing do to with the earlier experience with Line A.

The decision seems to have been based on a 2000 study for the World Bank, which compared Madrid’s successful subway roll-out to experiences in Mexico, Caracas, and Santiago. Madrid used steel and overhead and got it done cheaper. The reason was simply that most of its lines had historically used overhead wires and its maintenance operations were designed around them. (You don’t have to turn off the power to protect maintenance crews when you have overhead lines.) So it could use the same sort of railcar that it always used. In that sense, Madrid went with overhead for pretty much the same reason that Mexico City should have stuck with third rail. 

As for steel versus rubber, the study provided evidence that steel wheels should be cheaper. Steel wheels last longer, so there will be some savings over the long-run. And you need three sets of rails for rubber-wheeled trains, because you need guide tracks to keep them on course. So steel should be cheaper. But is it? As the study itself noted (page 77), Mexico’s rubber-wheeled trains can operate on 7% slopes and make turns with 105 meter radii, compared to 4% and 250 meters in Madrid. If Line 12 had used that technology, it would not have needed to be rebuilt.

In short, it looks like the Line 12 decision was the triumph of hope over experience. There were plenty of reasons to believe that steel wheels and overhead wires would be a better design if you were starting a subway from scratch. But Mexico City was not starting a subway from scratch. It was extending a well-established system. And its only experience with steel-wheeled cars was on what was a suburban light rail with much smaller cars and trains than the rest of the system. 

Still, the ending so far has not been unhappy. As we noted in 2014, the cost of the new line is still reasonable. Moreover, in May 2017 the government obtained a further discount of 2.1 billion pesos from the consortium built the line.  And ...

... the new trains, they are very nice!

On Cuban immigration, escalators, and helicopter parents

OK, time for me to vent.

President Obama did wrong by suspending the wet-foot Cuba policy. The United States and the Cuban Republic have a special relationship. Seriously, we do. Our histories have been intertwined more than any random pair of neighboring countries since at least 1898, and maybe earlier. Our intervention created Cuba; our internal politics kept it from becoming part of the United States; our intervention propped up governments; and our 1959 divorce was contentious and angry and contentious on both sides in ways that make no sense from purely economic or strategic standpoints. 

It makes perfect sense for the U.S. to treat Cuban migration differently than migration from, say, the Dominican Republic or Mexico or anywhere else. Cuba is, to coin a phrase, “domestic in a foreign sense.”

Sure, yeah, I understand, it was a quid-pro-quo to get Castro on board with normalizing relations. Still was wrong.

FWIW, I am not of Cuban descent and have no family in Cuba.

The London Underground did wrong by forcing people to stand on escalators. It may speed things up for the standees, but their own study showed that it raised times for walkers by 28%. If you’re too goddamned lazy to walk up a bloody escalator, then the extra time is what you should pay.

How about making everybody walk, huh? 

Middle-class parents in the DMV are weird by refusing to let their kids walk around by themselves. Seriously, it is weird. Somehow they have convinced themselves that all of America (let alone the Western world) is like them. But no. Frex this photo of kids scooting with no adults in sight on the Fulton Mall in downtown Brooklyn:

Or these kids playing handball in Long Island City:

Or this pic from a playground in the Fairmount section of Philly, ditto, at least for the two older kids in the pic, who (gasp) walked five blocks unsupervised to Roberto Clemente park to play with our bambini:

Seriously, you people. Do what you want with your kids, but don’t kid yourself. It’s weird, out-of-ordinary, strange to hover over a seven-year-old like they were four, let alone somebody nine. Let the kids walk, scoot and bike without you! And do not get me started on the proper age to ride the subway alone ...

Why we can’t have nice things

 Environmental reviews in the United States have long passed the bounds of reasonableness. European countries, with far-better environmental protections, are still able to build large-scale infrastructure projects. The United States, not so much.

California is the biggest offender. But it is everywhere. The Purple Line is back in court over ... oh, man. A bridge is too big, and should be made smaller and more expensive. More vegetation needs to be planted between the tracks to reduce runoff. And, of course, we need to protect the Hay’s Spring and Kenk’s amphipod. 

I do not know how to build a political coalition to weaken the environmental laws. Democratic operatives tell me that they would in theory be open, but in practice do not trust the Republicans enough to start the process. Republicans tell me that they would obviously love to weaken the protections, but worry about a backlash from NIMBYs who like the laws for completely non-environmental reasons. But they dismiss Democratic worries as political piffle and say that if the Democrats would provide cover, their amendments would pass.

Either way, it is depressing. We have bad environmental laws that block needed projects for no public benefit, yet the political system is unable to reform them. One side fears losing the baby with the bathwater; the other dismisses those fears but says that a lot of their supporters like being able to throw dirty bathwater at people. Gaaaaaah.

Air pollution in Mexico

 OK, so when I flew into Mexico earlier this month I was astounded to see the brownish murk as my plane descended into the Valley of Mexico. The horizon disappeared, the mountains were invisible. After landing, the sky had a strange greyish tinge that persisted even when you looked straight up. My eyes watered. It was awful.

Back to the 1990s, I thought! The government declared a smog emergency, ultimately taking most cars off the road. By the time I flew out on the morning of Saturday, May 7th, the sky had gone back to a normal blue and you could see the mountains. Ozone levels had dropped from almost twice the safe limit (0.11 ppm) to “only” 2% above. 

But it took heroic measures. The cutback on the number of cars in circulation was herculean. 

Naturally, I wanted to see if things were really back to the 1990s. How bad was this smog emergency in historical perspective? Sadly, the data wasn’t easily available in one place. So I decided to get it. And after much looking, I managed to put together a complete series on the average maximum daily ozone reading for the Zona Metropolitana del Valle de México (ZMVM). That is to say, it takes the highest reading from all five metropolitan sectors for every day, then averages that across all the days of the month.  The data from 1992 to 2010 (save 2003) are from INEGI, with the caveat that they changed the calculations in 2006 in a way that I do not fully understand. The data from all the other years are taken from hourly readings downloaded from the Atmospheric Monitoring Board of the D.F. government. I had to write some annoying Excel code to extract the data that I wanted, so I wouldn’t bet the bank on it having no errors.

Caveats aside, the numbers give a good idea of the trend:

Air quality has deteriorated markedly in the last three years, with spikes in May 2013, March 2014, April 2015 and ongoing for this year. But ... things are still better than they were when I left to work with Uncle Sam in 2002. And that despite an almost threefold increase in the number of motor vehicles in the metro area since then. 

I was told several competing (but not necessarily exclusive) hypotheses. The obvious one is that the number of vehicles on the roads has finally outrun the decrease in smog per car. A complimentary one notes that congestion has markedly gotten worse with the increase in the number of vehicles ... and idling cars pump out more smog. Finally, the D.F. mayor decided to allow any car that could pass the smog check to get the coveted permission to hit the road every day of the week. It used to be that only newish cars could qualify; once the car got past a certain number of years, you could only drive it four weekdays out of five. That reform meant both that older cars could legally put out 25% more smog ... and, of course, some cars that should not have passed the smog check did with a little baksheesh. 

And then there is the climate change hypothesis, but that is really a worry for the future.

But the future is coming fast. Even if things aren’t really back to the 1990s, it is clear that the government is going to have to do something fairly soon. The roads may be becoming saturated, but there is still lots of room for the number of vehicles on the road to increase. Traffic isn’t going to get better. And 2016 isn’t a fluke: as the data show, things have been getting worse for three years now.

A victory for Brooklyn south of the Diehipster Line

 Sadly, Die Hipster the blog is no more. But today South Brooklyn scored a victory over the new cool whatever not-Brooklyn Brooklyn with the restoration of express service on the F Train. That hasn’t existed since I was in high school! So, good. 

Me, though, I’m more concerned with the Red Line these days. Hopefully, they’ll do the accelerated rebuilding, rip the band-aid off, and give me a subway train that I can use on evenings and weekends. My neighbors, they talk of these mysterious far-off times when you could count on the Metro after 8pm and on weekends, to which I simply marvel. 

Pointless subway geekery

 I somehow managed to score 100% on this quiz, which asks you to identify cities by real-scale maps of their heavy rail systems. In my case, I think the information comes from riding enough subways to be able to eliminate possibilities when I did not recognize the city, but who knows? Anyway, it was fun, so here it is.

The Washington Metro was not, sadly, included.

Boston has monsters, which is a reason to dislike New Jersey

 Found scribbled on a notepad in my backpack (at least the parts in quotes):

“I was born in Brooklyn!”

You were?

“I was born in Boston and there were monsters in Boston. Mommy and Daddy had to protect me from the monsters in Boston.”

So you must not like Boston.

“I don’t like New Jersey.”

Why not?

“When I was in Boston I saw a monster coming to eat Tima and me.”

That sounds scary, but I don’t see the connection to New Jersey. Which state is your favorite?

“My favorite states are Trinidad and New York and Aper. Aper is a big city with a lot of people it doesn’t have no train. It has a train track. Trains drive on that train track. And it doesn’t have no station. And it doesn’t have no subway! You can go on the train tracks to New York. It just drives outside.”

Apparently, I did not follow up. Or I ran out of paper. This Aper sounds like an interesting place. (Unless he means Delaware.) And what is wrong with New Jersey? He must have overheard his parents complaining about the endless quality of the eponymous turnpike when we thought he was asleep. 

He is completely correct that Trinidad really should be a state.

Uber in Archiebunkerland

 So Uber and the NYC government have been battling it out. I will admit to having sympathy with the government. Not because I support the taxi monopoly: reader JKR, if he would be so kind, will attest that I railed against it at somewhat annoying length as far back as the 1980s. Rather, it is because of my general fear of a “gig economy” in which social insurance is still tied to employment ... only in which the “gigs” are not counted as employment. 

But I come to praise Uber, not to bury it. When I go to New York, I tend to stay either in Midwood, Brooklyn, or more-often in the beyond-the-subway reaches of Queens. LIRR service from Queens Village is usually hourly, so it usually makes more sense to go to the main LIRR station at Jamaica, where trains run at subway frequencies. Except Jamaica is several miles away. Now, the recent creation of the green taxis that do pick-up only in the boroughs means that it is easy to get a cab from Jamaica. But calling a cab to take you to Jamaica (or the airport, for that matter) has always been nearly hopeless. Half-hour waits and disappearing cars were the standard.

But then came Uber! And now, we have never waited more than ten minutes and we have only once had a cab agree to come and then cancel. (Yes, that happens with Uber in Queens. It’s still Queens. We walked down to Jamaica Avenue and caught a dollar cab instead.)

(Parenthetical comment inside a parenthesis: in Queens, the dollar cabs are fixed-route taxis. They ply a major street, picking up and letting off people along the way. They are cars, not vans, and often, but not always, painted black.)

So while not perfect, this Uber-financed study passes the smell test. The service really has improved taxi service in the outer boroughs beyond the subway, even if it costs about the same.

The Line 12 construction disaster actually makes Mexico look pretty good

 So Mexico City recently opened Line 12 of the metro. Built in five years at $145 million per mile, it is a miracle compared to the long-tragedy that is the Second Avenue subway. (New York, in its awesomely pathetic current incarnation, is going to take 10 goddamned years at $2.7 billion per mile.) The underground portions of the line were built by cut-and-cover, so the stations are easy to access, and according to Professor Andrés Calderón of the Universidad Iberoamericana, the tunnels did not cost much more than the elevated portions.

A triumph! 

Until the damn thing broke down. 

They had to close half the line and run trains crazy-slow over the rest.

So what happened? Well, the D.F. decided to build the line using conventional steel rails and steel wheels instead of the French-style rubber-wheeled trains used on most of the system. Still, it isn’t the first time that Mexico City built a steel-wheeled line: Line A (lettered lines run across the border from the Distrito Federal into Mexico State) uses steel wheels.

But Line 12 used new, bigger and heavier cars than Line A. And those cars had trouble making curves tighter than a 350-meter radius. Of which there were a bunch on the elevated section. So that wrecked the rails and the railbed. In September, a consultant determined that most of the rails would need to be replaced ... and at least one section of the elevated portion of the line would have to be rebuilt. Worse yet, Prof. Calderón told me that rebuilding that section would mean that multiple private homes would need to be expropriated and demolished. The blame right now seems to be falling on the Spanish company that built the trains. The line won’t fully reopen until November 2015.

So, a disaster for Mexico.

Or is it?

1. The line will open almost two years late and at a cost of $216 million per mile ... but still cheaper and faster than shorter lines in the U.S.
2. After the fracaso become public, the D.F. hit 33 Metro officials hard with fines and other sanctions. Does that ever happen in the United States?
3. The construction companies are now in court over how much they will have to pay. Victory is not assured; the dispute has hurt their stock badly.
4. The disaster is not going to lead to the cancellation of the unbuilt portion of the line. The D.F. is going to pay for the new section to the Observatorio station. In fact, current Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera (of whom I am not generally a fan) wants to expand the Metro even further during his term. Would that happen in the United States? 
5. Finally, the politicians responsible are hurting as well. Former mayor Marcelo Ebrard is taking a hit in his popularity in the D.F. He will need to overcome the headwinds if he wants to win the presidency in 2018. Greater screw-ups often seem to have little political impact in America.

In short: an engineering disaster wrecked the rollout of a new transit line. But the disaster also wrecked the careers of the responsible bureaucrats and may wreck the finances of the responsible companies.  Moreover, despite the overruns and delays, the D.F. will still get a line built cheaper and faster than anything in the United States. 

So take away the opposite of the moral that you thought you were going to take away, pinche gringos! Mexico comes out looking pretty good in this story of woe. 

Sic transit gloria Bogotá

Bogotá is famous for its TransMilenio system. (I continue to confuse Bogotanos by referring it to it as the Metrobus, which is the name of Mexico City’s imitation.) TransMilenio is bus rapid transit (BRT): elevated stations with entry turnstyles and dedicated bus lanes. TransMilenio beats its Mexico City counterpart in having two lanes on some routes, allowing for express buses. I was last here in 2010; since then, the system has been extended east-west through downtown.  

But it still, well, sucks. It’s overcrowded; always, all the time, sardine-overcrowded. And since the traffic lights don’t give it priority, it isn’t all that fast. It beats the smaller buses, and sometimes it beats a taxi, but it is not pleasant. Thus, angry riots in 2012.

The city is proposing a light rail system to supplement the TransMilenio. A surface tram would be cheaper than an underground metro, and trams have more capacity than buses. Sounds great! There are even private consortiums ready to cough up the money. So what’s not to like?

Simply put: light rail can’t handle the demand.

First, a bit about Bogotá’s geography. The city is sharply limited to the east by a large mountain range. The “Borde Oriental” sprawls north from the old downtown along the edge of the mountain range. Employment and (wealthy) housing has crowded along the Borde. (The Borde is traditionally held to end around 72nd Street, but has been creeping further north.) The city has then sprawled out to the west from the Borde. Imagine Chicago, only with a mountain range instead of a lake. Roads are numbered from the beginning of the mountains; each subsequent road runs is a little under 400 feet west of the previous, or about  50% longer than a Manhattan city block. Since the border of the mountain range is not really straight, Seventh Road is the easternmost road that runs continuously from downtown to the prosperous northern suburbs.

(This link gives a good overview, although the map inexplicably rotates the maps 90-degrees counterclockwise.)

Not surprisingly, then, one of the two proposed light rail routes runs north up Seventh Road from downtown all the way to 193rd Street. North of 119th Street it would transfer to an existing right-of-way, but south of there it would be right down the middle of Seventh Road. It is supposed to move 263,000 people per day at an average speed of 25 miles per hour. Trains will run every 2½ minutes.

Or not.

Each train will have a capacity of 760 people, cramming in ‘em at TransMilenio levels of six people per square meter of floorspace. (Try it: that is crowded. In fact, by the standards of everywhere save the Manhattan-bound F-train at 8:30am, that is overcrowded.) To meet the travel projections, peak demand will be 23,188 people per hour. At 760 people per train, that’s 31 trains per hour ... or one every 118 seconds. 118 is rather less than the projected headway of 150 seconds.

The traffic light at 72nd Street right now cycles at 120 seconds for cross-traffic. Keeping that would cut the number of trains per hour by a factor of three. Otherwise trains would back up at traffic lights and arrive in bunches ... the way buses always seem to. Moreover, cars often block-the-box: you would need to ban left turns, but even that might not suffice.

In fact, nowhere has at-grade light rail running at 25 mph with 150-second headways. Melbourne (unlike everywhere in the United States, including Philly and S.F.) kept its tram network after WW2. The most heavily used line runs at 10 miles per hour with a seven-minute headway. Not modern enough for you? Well, Paris is building a boatload of trams in its outer boroughs. They average 13 mph with a four-minute headway. (All data in the above is courtesy of Uniandes.)

Now, trams are a bit better than more TransMilenio lines. TransMilenio was always considered a second-best option, even by Mayor Enrique Peñalosa, who greenlighted it because the Metro was unaffordable at the time. But unless you can be assured that the private contractors will be picking up all of the capital cost, then it is far from clear that a light rail beats TransMilenio in cost-benefit terms.

A metro, though, clearly does beat both TransMilenio and the light rail. And design contracts were just signed.

But. The first problem is that a metro has a giant capital cost, and both the city of Bogotá and the national government are capital constrained. The second problem is that the city of is not, shall we say, well governed. Combine them and the privately-funded light rail line is going to be a hard thing to kill.

Which would not be terrible ... if you were sure that no public money would go into the light rail. Uh huh.

Pants on the ground! Pants on the ground!

 It has been a little harder to keep up the blog than I had thought. Work is quite pressing. But every so often, something comes up that the rest of the internets seem to be ignoring. So, in the interest of showing how Boston is changing, I would like to mention that Sunday was the fourth annual “No Pants Subway Ride,” in which people ride the T without any pants.

Of course, as you might expect, the “No Pants Subway Ride” didn’t start in Boston in 2007. It started in New York in 2002, and has since gone international. An example of the influence of the internet! I can hear some of you shouting. Well ... probably not. I mean, I’m sure that this idea in particular spread via the internets, but anyone familiar with the 1960s will find lots of similar events, and let’s not mention the decade after that one. Moreover, the participants physically rally before removing their pants. So please no conclusionamating about the awesome marveliciousness of our new interlinkeded planet. 

It isn’t really a surprise to find that it’s spread to Boston ... Boston has a giant 250,000 person college town laid atop the real city of 1.7 million. While Boston itself is not the sort of place that would smile upon pantless T-riding, the college town appended onto it certainly would. So no surprise there. And it has also spread to such unsurprising places as Philly. After all, the city that celebrates Mummer’s Day is not going to have a problem with pants-removing on the Orange Line. 

I have to admit that it was a bit more unexpected to find that it had spread to the Mexico City. But when you think about it, that reaction makes no sense. The D.F. long ago left behind its cultural conservatism. 

My excuse is that the rapidity of the cultural changes in Mexico between 1990 and today have left me reeling. Still, the United States changed even more between 1960 and 1980. So it is far from unprecendented. And why wouldn’t the chilangos take advantage of the opportunity to ride the subway without any pants?

My worry that it presages the end of Mexico’s unofficial ban on shorts.

Here is a much better photo of the Mexico City event, courtesy of El Pinche Holandés:

 

Tomando el tranvía en la madre patria

There are two types of rail transit systems in the United States.  The first are actual genuine rail transit systems, you know, that get people around and without which their cities would collapse.  Or at least not work very well.  New York’s subway, Chicago’s El, Boston’s T, Philadelphia’s SEPTA, San Francisco’s much-hated Muni, even (after many years in the second category) Washington’s Metro.

And then there’s art.  Take Miami-Dade’s Metrorail.  In fact, the county went so far as to deck the tracks out in neon tubing, just in case you missed that the point was public art, not public transportation.  And there are others.  How many people would notice if San José’s light rail shut down?

Barcelona’s Metro (above) falls into the first category.  It’s incredibly efficient:  never did we have to wait more than two minutes for a train.  It’s got these signs that tell you when the next train will arrive, and it does.  The old trains are comfortable, and the new trains have arrived out of the future, with open articulated connections between the cars and bright video screens.  There’s even this bitchen feature that you first think is stupid until you realize that it really speeds things up:  to get the doors to open, you got to push a button.

One of the things that Amma and I like to do when we’re in a strange city is grab a public conveyance and take it to the end of the line.  You can learn a lot that way.  And Sevilla has a futuristic streetcar that runs along the pedestrianized downtown.  So ...

... we got on.  And a minute later, we got off.  Along with everyone else.  Was there a criminal in the train?  A police check?  Should we be smelling something?  Nope, just the end of the art exhibit. 

The thing runs a whopping 1.4 kilometers, all within the historic center, between the “New Plaza” near city hall and the bus stop at Prado de San Sebastián.  (See below.)  You can walk its whole route in less than 15 minutes. 

Then again, they’re building a rather extensive metro, so maybe it won’t always be art.  But right now?

All I can say is that when we first saw the strikers blocking the train, we thought that they were pretty damn militant.  And after riding the thing, we think they’re pretty damn mild. 

Tropical Walkabout

I guess Mexican politics isn't that interesting.  Back to Puerto Rico!

San Juan has a subway.  Strangely, it doesn’t quite make it into the old city.  It’s the best way to get to the University of Puerto Rico campus, however, so we’ve done a lot of walking (or bus riding) through the intervening neighborhoods of Miramar and Santurce. 

They’ve cleaned up the prostitutes from Miramar, at least while the sun is out, but the place has seen better days.  Much better days. The old hotels either either falling apart or abandoned, and the height of fine dining seems to be a Pizzería Uno shoehorned into a misbegotten attempt at urban renewal, Fort Lauderdale-style.  (Next to a Taco Maker, of course.)  The architecture is not-quite-Art-Deco tropical, so it’s easy to imagine a future Miramar in which the buildings have been rehabbed, the gang graffiti erased, and the offices of the Partido Revolucionario Dominicano represent a club-owners sense of irony rather than … well, why does the PRD have an office in San Juan?

It could happen.  Miramar is a neighborhood where old women and teenagers greet the bus driver by name as it meanders between the old city and the Sagrado Corazón subway stop.  It’s even got a little movie theater playing indie flicks.  But it ain’t there yet.

Same goes for Santurce.  It’s a little nicer, but not by much, and there are some abandoned buildings.  The Plaza de Mercado was disappointing.  It turned out to be small and utterly unfunky, populated by day by beer-drinking older fellows who claimed to be retired construction workers.  (Which, in fact, they probably are.  Many employees here retire at 55; and about one in eight people live on a pension of some sort.)  The fruit for sale was just fruit, like you can find in any Cambridge convenience store.  And the market was spotless.  Being in a country where the health and safety regulations are ruthlessly enforced is a good thing, of course, but it takes some of the romance out of food shopping.