The Bogotá metro has a website, Instagram, Twitter profile with 146,000 followers and even a group of friends on Facebook.
But it doesn't exist.
No trains, no tracks, no stations.
So far it has only been an idea.
A plan that the city began to amass in 1942, when it had 400,000 inhabitants.
80 years have passed, dozens of mayors and projects stored in drawers.
The city grew to almost eight million Bogotanos.
The traffic turned into eternal chaos.
No one ever saw a wagon running.
Citizens still raise their eyebrows if asked about it as if they don't believe it is now under construction.
The mayoress of the capital, Claudia López, sounds emphatic after years of unfulfilled announcements: “The first line is not a dream, it is not a project, it is a contract that goes to 18%.
The subway goes and goes now ”.
The progress in Patio Taller, the maintenance place and where the trains will sleep, prove him right: the works are underway, but it is easy to forget.
The noise around the largest construction in the country continues.
The plan has already gone through so many administrations that it has too many parents.
The mayors who got their hands on the project —Gustavo Petro and Enrique Peñalosa— are still arguing at this point about what would be better.
One of the two is today President Petro, so he has proposed a new revision to the already agreed project.
The story comes from afar.
Subway projects failed to advance for 70 years.
Either because the city government paralyzed it or because the national government stopped it.
Money was never enough.
It was a decade ago when it began to take shape.
At that time, the current president was mayor of Bogotá.
Juan Manuel Santos headed the national government.
Petro made a lot of progress in the project of an underground metro and even agreed with Santos a national contribution of 70% of the budget.
But his term ended before making it happen.
Then there are two versions.
Petro's, who says that he left the subway ready to be built.
And that of Peñalosa, who says that upon reaching the mayor's office they saw that due to the devaluation of the peso in 2014 the project had ceased to be viable based on costs/benefits.
The reality goes through two key points: the Petro metro was never put out to tender, so it did not arrive armored to the next mayor's office, and Peñalosa, for his part, was in favor of building an elevated metro and prioritizing the start-up of the Transmilenio, the articulated bus system that runs on its own track.
When the second relieved the first, he captured his project.
And that fight between the two continues to this day.
Andrés Escobar, manager of the Metro Company with Peñalosa and at the beginning of the López mayor's office, does not criticize Petro's plan, but he does maintain that it was unfeasible, at least in 2015: “It could not be done.
Not because the project was bad, but because of the devaluation and the operating costs”.
The Government of Santos, says Escobar, warned the new mayor that there would be no more money than was promised to his predecessor.
So, Peñalosa and his team commissioned a comparison between the underground metro —Petro's— and the elevated metro —Peñalosa—, which was 19% cheaper, which a priori is not a surprise.
It is more expensive to tunnel and build underground than on the surface, and more expensive to maintain an underground subway that needs artificial lighting and ventilation.
The project went out to tender and Apca Transmimetro, a Chinese consortium, won it.
In the meantime, four years had already passed and new elections were drawing near in the city.
The subway still existed only on paper maps.
"I voted for Claudia because she said she was not going to do the elevated subway," says a Colombian analyst today, visibly angry.
López assured in the campaign that the underground was a better option.
He even says so now.
"I have a certain predisposition for it to be underground, Bogotá is already a city made and built and very dense," she tells EL PAÍS.
But the contract for the first line had already been signed when she arrived, and backtracking meant further delay.
She assures that she limited herself to continuing the progress to solve a problem of decades as soon as possible.
In fact, the second metro line, which has already been planned during her government, will be underground – if she manages to get it tendered before she leaves the Mayor's Office in January 2024.
Petro, embarked on a thousand fronts since his government began in August, refuses to release the work.
A few weeks ago, he met with the mayor to ask her for information on the possibility of making a section of the first line underground.
The Mayor's Office maintains that they are studying the possibility and the Chinese consortium is carrying out a parallel project to see what the extra cost would be.
It will be presented to the president on January 16.
"The problem is whether it is legally viable with the contract as it is and financially," says López.
Along the way, millions of pesos have been lost in projects and studies that will never see the light of day.
Peñalosa continues to insist that it cannot be made underground because of Bogotá's unstable soil, although technically it could be done.
The debate continues between them on Twitter and in public statements confusing the population, which is still wondering:
Is the subway already being built or not?
what is today
The construction of the so-called first line of the Bogotá metro has already begun and it is the elevated project that the Government of Peñalosa closed.
It is scheduled to start operations in 2028. It will have 24 kilometers and 16 stations and is budgeted at 22.3 billion pesos.
Although everything could change next January if the president opts for the project being prepared by the Chinese consortium to make a section underground.
It is the largest infrastructure under construction in the country.
The second metro line, which must be tendered in 2023 and construction begin in 2024, should start operating in 2032. It is 15.4 kilometers long, with 11 stations and a budget of 34.93 billion pesos.
But the subway is not the only work in progress.
There are a thousand open in the capital, 500 minors and 500 majors.
Schools, hospitals, highways, aerial cables,
Bogota has lousy traffic.
According to a Traffic Index study, it is the fourth worst city in the world in terms of vehicular traffic and the first in Latin America.
This means that each Bogota citizen loses 126 hours per year in traffic jams, which represents 55% of delays in routes.
The works will make transit more difficult, but the city's mobility problems require new infrastructure.
Urban buses are inefficient and the transmilenio service launched by Peñalosa alleviated part of the problem in the early 2000s, but today it is also insufficient and people travel overcrowded in vehicles.
The subway seems to be starting, but in this story it is better not to be forceful.
EL PAÍS already published in 2017 that, if there were no new obstacles, construction of the first line would begin in 2019. And there were.
Now the beginning of the works is a fact, but up to there it can be said.
The Peñalosa project could still end up including the Petro project.
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