The image is already part of the landscape: an infinite pilgrimage of vehicles that cover all the lanes of some arterial road, while struggling to advance in the middle of rush hour at the speed that insufferable traffic allows. And seen from behind, a countless amount of red lights indicate that the driver has his foot on the brake pedal. It is the cursory description of a traffic jam in Bogotá, the city that has the worst traffic in the world according to the TomTom index, which has revealed its 2022 figures. The numbers are resounding: drivers in the Colombian capital and its metropolitan region lose on average five and a half days (132 hours) each year in rush hour traffic jams.
TomTom is a Dutch manufacturer of navigation systems, and uses several data sources to offer its services. Some of that data is used to create their annual traffic index, in which, in 2022, they evaluated 390 cities around the world with two parallel lists: one for the central traffic of cities and one for that of metropolitan areas. In the first list, the worst-rated city was London, with 139 hours in traffic jams. In the second list, it was Bogotá where, on the other hand, the average annual time invested by a vehicle at peak times is 244 hours (just over 10 days, enough time to read 48 books, says TomTom), at a speed of 19km / h. Other cities in the world that did not come out well were Manila (Philippines), Lima (Peru), Recife (Brazil) and Mexico City.
For Darío Hidalgo, a professor at the Javeriana University, a good part of Bogotá's problem lies in its lack of infrastructure, especially in the accesses to the city from the surrounding municipalities. "We are advancing in the expansion of the north highway and the seventh race, in the construction of the longitudinal avenue of the west (ALO), the works for the access on 13th street are being contracted. That's going to help us, but it's not all it takes." The other great difficulty, he says, has to do with management, with many blockages at intersections, simple crashes that cause traffic jams, cars parked on arterial roads ... All that, added up, causes the monster of road congestion in the city.
In his opinion, speed management is also necessary, but downwards: "People think that speed should always be raised, but if speed is managed well, 50km / h on arterial roads and 30 km / h in premises, travel times improve. " It seems a contradiction, he concedes, but he explains that a moderate speed prevents incidents and that everything flows better. This is not the case when the speed is higher, there is a lot of acceleration and braking and the incidents increase.
An index far from complexity
While Hidalgo recalls that the TomTom index does not include all cities in the world, César Ruiz, professor at the Faculty of Engineering of the National University, emphasizes that the ranking is far from covering the complexity of mobility in Bogotá. In his opinion, the big problem of the city is not traffic congestion, but how to ensure that people who do not have access to a private car can move safely, quickly, economically and comfortably. "If people have their place of work very far from where they live, there will be travel problems in all modes of transport," he says, and complements his idea with a fact: there are those who take more than two hours to make that journey every day.
On the other hand, he considers that depending on arterial roads is another of the great defects of Bogotá's mobility: they must be used to travel short distances or to move from one neighborhood to another. They bring together the vast majority of means of transport, public and private: buses, individuals, motorcycles, trucks ... "There is a very high dependence on arterial pathways that cannot cope and never will," he says. He adds that the solution is not to expand them, because "it has been shown that every time you invest in some solution of arterial roads, what you do is attract more traffic." Then he mentions a transport alternative that in his opinion should be strengthened, especially to free the roads from vehicles that make short or medium trips: the bicycle.
The bicycle, the great virtue of Bogota
Bogotá is recognized worldwide for being one of the cities where the use of bicycles is massive. And not only to exercise, but to make tours every day, replacing any motor vehicle. Both Ruiz and Hidalgo agree that this is one of the great virtues of the city's mobility, even though its use is partly the product of the enormous difficulties involved in going through the streets in another medium. According to the mobility survey carried out by the Mayor's Office in 2019 – the most recent – 880,367 bicycle trips are made every day in the city. And if those made in the surrounding municipalities are added, the figure reaches 1,177,868.
This widespread use of the bicycle helps that, as Hidalgo observes, the distribution of the way in which one travels in the city can be "considered sustainable": 69% of the trips made in Bogotá, he says, are due to the sum of those who move by bicycle, on foot or by public transport. However, trips by private vehicle are still measured in seven figures: again according to the mobility survey, every day, adding Bogotá with its metropolitan region, 2,291,877 trips are made by that means.
For Ruiz, the only way to get those who move in their cars every day to change them for public transport is to make it attractive enough. That is usually measured in time. "If a person knows that it is going to take two or three hours from Chía (north) to Bogotá on a Saturday, but instead in a public transport, in a train, it is 40 minutes, that is an attraction," he says. Although that possibility does not exist today: projects for commuter trains that connect Bogotá with the municipalities that are in the north and west are advancing, but slowly. They have been talked about for more than 20 years. And in one sentence he tries to summarize the core of the problem that gives Bogota transport its bad reputation that is already worldwide: "The cause is a structural lag of a very good mass and collective public transport in the city."
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