After some early hiccups, Tranantiago might just have a promising future. Photo by kurotashiO! ®

A year after its mangled implementation, Transantiago, the ambitious program to restructure Santiago’s sprawling and inefficient bus system, is still generating quite a bit of buzz. Last week, for example, The Economist published a piece on the political fallout from Transantiago, suggesting that the precipitous drop in President Michelle Bachelete’s approval ratings were caused by the system’s shortcomings.

Other media outlets throughout Chile have followed up with similar stories of their own. (See El Mercurioand Radio Cooperativa)

Recently I’ve heard many questions about the future of Santiago’s bus system: should it return to the partially de-regulated operations of the 1990s? Or maybe even go back to the totally deregulated transit of the early 1980s?

The answer to these questions is unequivocal: no.

Overall, the service during the 1980s and 1990s was extremely poor, resulting in unprecedented gridlock, high accident rates, increased air pollution, and long travel times. During this period, the upwardly mobile, whose incomes rose during the economic boom, turned their backs on mass transit, opting for the convenience of cars, which flooded the streets and only exacerbated the congestion and air pollution plaguing Santiago. Read the rest of this entry »

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TranSantiago in action. Photo by Cobalito.

“It is not common for a president to stand before the nation and say ‘Things haven’t gone well,” Michele Bachelet, Chile’s President, said in March of this year. “But that is exactly what I want to say in the case of Transantiago. The inhabitants of Santiago, especially the poorest deserve an apology.”

So what went so wrong with TranSantiago, the Chilean capital’s new bus system, that warranted a national apology from the president?

Conceived more than six years ago, TranSantiago was nothing less than a complete overhaul of Santiago’s public transit system with a particular focus on the buses that clogged the city’s streets. In broad strokes, Santiago took old, polluting buses off the streets, partially replaced them with new, clean buses, and reorganized bus routes to maximize the efficiency of the system as a whole. The whole purpose was to reduce system costs and, very specially, to reduce air pollution, a major problem due to thermal inversion in the winter months. Read the rest of this entry »

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