Cable car to serve Mexico City outskirts
Cablebus seen as a cheaper public transport to poor communities
Mexico City has launched the first of what it hopes will be several cable-car lines serving the poorer outskirts of the city of 9 million.
Thursday’s inauguration of the first leg of the ‘Cablebus’ line marks the latest chapter in Latin America’s love affair with cable cars, which are seen in much of the world as largely for tourists and ski slopes.
The neighbouring State of Mexico already has a cable car serving one northern Mexico City suburb, and the city’s own first line was also built on the poor, crowded north side.
Cable cars are seen as a cheaper, quicker way to bring public transport to poor communities located high up hillsides. Since they’re airborne, the car lines also don’t have as many difficulties with Latin America’s notoriously difficult issues of chaotic development, bad traffic and lack of rights-of-way.
By June, the line will run almost 9.2km from Cuautepec, a working class neighbourhood on the northern edge of Mexico City, to the nearest subway and bus station. The stretch inaugurated Thursday covers just 1.7km of that route, to the neighbourhood of Tlalpexco.
At present, officials explained, residents at the top of the hill in Tlalpexco have to board crowded, small vans that travel much more slowly. Plus, they don’t have the nice view the cable cars offer from their big windowed cars that can seat 10 passengers at a time. The cars run on electricity and can travel about 20km/h, far faster than most traffic in the city.
“There are nearly a million inhabitants living in the area around the Cablebus, and they make their trips in small vans that descend through narrow streets, and that may take, from the highest point ... as long as 55 minutes or an hour,” Guillermo Calderon, director of the electrical transportation system Mexico City.
Traditional transport solutions like bus or subway lines are almost impossible here.