By: Iván Sosa y Alejandro Ramos, Grupo Reforma

The opening of Metrobus is a revolution seeking to put an end to the poor treatment of the city’s citizens, accidents, congestion, and the intensive pollution generated by the previous system of microbuses, said various experts speaking at the first International Congress on Sustainable Transport.

“It’s revolutionary to build a friendly system, since it represents the end of an era where experts misunderstood transportation as the movement of vehicles rather than the movement of people,” said Adriana Lobo, Director of the Center for Sustainable Transport.

“It as been a gradual process to reshape the city’s transit, and certain inconveniences for the daily passengers have to be corrected, such as the informal commerce that has now emerged in the Indios Verdes terminal,” said Luis Gutierrez, Director of the Latin American program of EMBARQ, an organization promoting the implementation of the Metrobus.

“When planning, the objective must be to facilitate the mobility of people, not vehicles. As obvious as this might sound, various governments in Latin America have forgotten this. Therefore, a transformation of a transport system that is for the people implies a cultural change, seeking to overcome the misconception that public transit is for the poor and the losers, while the automobile is for the successful,” said the Secretary of Transport Planning of Chile, Henry Malbran, who is seeking to open a BRT in 2006, TranSantiago.

BRT is also revolutionary as it replaces the unregulated and corrupt transport concessions, with a system that is regulated and organized where the concessions and the users benefit from its efficiency, said the Luis Enrique Moreno, Director of Transport of Leon, home of Mexico’s first BRT system, Optibus.

“BRT was a transformation for Bogotá, Colombia, where it was led by two consecutive mayoral terms of Enrique Peñalosa and Antanas Mokus”, said Ricardo Montezuma, Director of Colombia’s Ciudad Humana program.

These two leaders are considered visionaries, first by generating a collective city consciousness based on the simple question: Which city do we want? Later they built Transmilenio as a component of an integrated program to recover the public space regardless of their initial loss of popularity.

Every city in Latin America has the challenge of supplying a comprehensive public transport system that does not only serve the poor, but also serves the private-vehicle users who regularly create congestion and pollution for all the rest,” concluded Malbran.