The sign-holders, the drummers, and the group supporting the cloth subway car are marching around La Carolina Park (Quito’s largest inner-city park) advertising the Metro. The sign (translated) reads: “Quito’s Metro has arrived. Quito is being reborn.” Note the striped pedestrian and cycling paths. Many Quiteños use La Carolina Park for walking, running, or cycling.
I spent several days in Quito last week. I particularly wanted to ride the Metro, the city’s brand-new subway. Quito’s Metro had opened commercially a week earlier, on December 1. It had been a long time coming. Construction started in 2013. The Metro opened briefly in May 2023 but closed quickly when it was realized that the system was not yet ready; there had apparently been major problems with coordinating the system’s many contractors—as well as with ticketing.1
Ticketing remains a problem. There are no ticket machines. Most passengers line up at understaffed windows and pay the fare (45 U.S. cents) in cash.2 If only because this is an awkward amount of money, the majority of customers must wait for change. There were enormous lines outside certain stations on the Sunday (December 10) when I first rode the system.
Long lines of passengers waiting to be allowed to purchase tickets at the San Francisco station.
The problems don’t end with a purchase. Tickets are paper tickets with a QR code. Turnstiles that allow entrance to the system have scanners. You have to position the QR code in a particular place under the scanner to enter the system. I can attest that this doesn’t always work.
The entity responsible for public transport in Quito—the Empresa Pública Metropolitana de Movilidad y Obras Públicas—would like users to set up accounts that allow entry to the system by QR codes on smartphones. To create an account you have to fill out an elaborate form and submit it, either in person or online. Ecuador is one of those countries where electronic payments are rare—most people use cash for everything—and I gather that, despite relentless advertisements, relatively few people have set up accounts. This is obviously a real problem.3
Except for the ticketing issue, the system seemed to be operating smoothly when I was there. The trains (from the Spanish firm, CAF) were running without glitches (although neither the next-train signs in the stations nor the informational signs in most train interiors were working). The cars—powered by pantographs touching overhead wires—are standard contemporary metro cars with open gangways. Oddly, there are no advertisements in the trains. The trains’ exteriors are decorated with stylized pictures suggesting some of Quito’s distinctive features.
Metro train, probably in La Carolina station.
The stations—also completely without advertising of any kind—are sparkling. They are all similar, although adjacent stations are colored differently, and the geography of some stations is altered by the presence of multiple exits. There are substantial mezzanines in all (or nearly all) the stations, and, because there are few columns, views from the mezzanines down to the tracks are possible. There are escalators here and there. All stations also have elevators, but I never saw anyone using one.
Station stairs and escalators, probably San Francisco station.
Directional signage in the stations is quite elegant.
All platforms have system and local maps as well as a chart of fares.
The system—impressively—is entirely underground.
Riders in many cases were visibly delighted. I’d never before been in a subway where a large proportion of the passengers were walking around staring at features of the system, smiling, and taking selfies.
Sunday afternoon on a crowded Metro train.
There were ample reminders of how new some of the Metro’s features were to some passengers. Numerous people hesitated to get on the escalators. Many standing passengers clearly did not realize that it’s a good idea to hold on to or lean against something while the train is in motion. And not a single passenger getting on a train was willing to wait for passengers to disembark. (Of course, this happens even on some subways—Delhi’s for example—that have been around for a while.)
Quito, as I mentioned in an earlier post, has a very distinctive geography. Most people live in a long valley perhaps 45 km long and something like 5 km wide, oriented roughly north-south (but actually north-north-east/south-south-west). The valley is bordered by a high volcano on the west and substantial hills on the east. Air quality in Quito is often poor. I was able to smell motor-vehicle exhaust just about every moment I was in Quito, even on a Sunday, when many roads are closed for a ciclovía and most businesses are shut. (The 2850-m altitude may not help.4) The air-quality problem—and the fact that so much movement runs in a fairly narrow corridor—make Quito a good candidate for serious public transport, and governments have been willing to play their part. In the 1990s, the city established what is now called Metrobús-Q, a BRT system consisting of three more or less parallel corridors along the central part of the valley (one route, the Trole, is partly served by trolleybuses). The Metro adds a new north-south corridor. The Metro route is approximately parallel to the BRT lines, but the Metro serves a few places—for example, the heart of the Centro Histórico, the Plaza de San Francisco—that the BRT lines mostly miss by a few blocks.
Map of part of Quito emphasizing the Metro, Metrobús-Q lines, and pedestrian facilities. The nominal scale of the map is 1:75,000. That’s the scale it would have if printed on an 11 x 8-1/2 inch sheet of paper. GIS data come in part from the Geofabrik version of OpenStreetMap. I’ve edited the data to some extent. The map is clickable, enlargeable, and downloadable.
The stations are fairly far apart. The Metro has 15 stations along its 22.5-km route5 and takes about half as long—34 minutes—to make a full trip as the BRT vehicles can manage over the same distance.
The Metro was financed partly with tax dollars and partly with loans from many different sources. It was surely a major undertaking for a country like Ecuador, which, despite the presence of oil in the Amazon and a reasonably prosperous agricultural sector, is not at all wealthy.6
In recent years Ecuador has been going through a difficult period. There have been intractable political conflicts, and the country has been suffering from a major crime problem associated in part with the drug trade. During my recent trip, I stayed (as many foreigners do) in La Mariscal, a neighborhood which, within living memory, was a dense, healthy, bustling more or less middle-class place. It still is, to a large extent, by day, but, because of fear of crime, La Mariscal’s sidewalks now tend to be deserted at night. It’s pretty impressive that Quito has been able to construct an elaborate Metro system despite the country’s problems.
- Ecuador’s newspapers have covered the Metro’s problems closely. There’s an archive of some of El Comercio’s news stories here. ↩
- Ecuador uses the U.S. dollar as its currency. The fare on bus lines remains 0.25 USD. In a relatively poor country, I can imagine that the substantially higher Metro fare will discourage use. The plan is to establish a Metro + bus fare of 0.60 USD. ↩
- I don’t know why Quito hasn’t opted for state-of-the-art contactless stored-value cards. I tried asking but had trouble explaining what these were. ↩
- I believe that Quito’s Metro is the world’s highest. ↩
- Provision was made to add five stations if demand warrants it. The total distance—22.5 km—may seem modest, but Quito now has more kilometers of subway service than, say, Chicago, where only 18 of the city’s 169 km of routes are underground. ↩
- Per capita GNI in 2022 according to the World Bank was $6,310 in 2022 (PPP: $12,630—the cost of living in Ecuador is generally low). ↩