Liberal Landscape

I visited Lima’s Metro last week. It’s a very distinctive system, for a number of reasons.¹

[1] Lima’s Metro does not really go downtown, and it doesn’t come very close to Lima’s newer quasi-CBD in and around Miraflores and San Isidro either (see map). This is odd in that nearly all rail rapid transit systems, for reasons that are pretty clear, serve cities’ central business districts. Rail rapid transit, always expensive to build, is really only justified when there are large numbers of passengers, and, even in cities with weak CBDs,  there are still likely to be numerous jobs in government, finance, and tourism in the old downtown, and the largest passenger flows are most probably going to be to and from the CBD. Lima’s Metro comes close to the old Centro Histórico, but the nearest stations are more than two kilometers from the heart of the Centro, and this is an awkward distance to traverse. Jirón Junín, the shortest route between the Miguel Grau station and the Plaza Mayor, takes you along some blocks where (at least when I visited) there were more stray dogs than people; it’s a scary walk. There are buses along Avenida Grau that connect the station with the southern edge of the CBD, but they require an extra fare and quite a few minutes of passengers’ time, and of course you have to figure out an extraordinarily complicated bus system, largely run by private operators.

There do exist a few other Metro systems in the world that don’t go to a CBD, but they’re almost all exceptions that prove the rule. Bangkok’s Skytrain doesn’t serve the older CBD on the Chao Phraya River, but its two lines come together next to Siam Square, the effective center of Bangkok’s modern commercial life. In Miami, the Metro, as in Lima, only skirts the CBD, but it’s connected with Miami’s downtown via the Metromover. There’s also the case of San Juan’s Tren Urbano, which serves the newer commercial district Hato Rey but has never made it to the old city. This line is not generally considered to be a great success. It attracts fewer passengers than any other American rail rapid transit system except Cleveland’s,² which also serves only the edge of downtown. Lima’s Metro arguably has the poorest connection with its main commercial districts of any rail rapid transit system in the world.

Let me add that the fact that Lima’s Metro has attracted numerous passengers without serving its CBD very well does suggest that some of the received conceptions of how people move in cities may not be quite right—this appears to be an under-researched subject. It could be the case that the “desire lines” of people of modest income in Third World cities are quite different than those of middle-income people in North America and Europe. That is, these people could have less interest in travel to the CBD, since the jobs—and products—present there may not be available to them. One of the stops on the Metro where the largest number of people get on and off is Gamarra, the site of a truly enormous clothing market and of bus and van connections to many places. It may be a more important node for relatively poor people than the Centro Histórico.

[2] Lima’s Metro is entirely elevated. It’s even been claimed to be the world’s longest urban elevated railroad at 24 km (plus 10 km of surface tracks). (This claim is somewhat dubious.) Its status as an elevated railway is one of the chief reasons it does not serve the Centro Histórico. The line is nearly all built in the center of exceptionally wide streets and is very heavily engineered, in part to mitigate the area’s substantial seismic risks. Its heavy presence makes it a somewhat overbearing neighbor, and it would not have fit (or been very welcome) in the relatively narrow streets of the Centro Histórico or of places like Miraflores and San Isidro.

[3] Lima’s Metro mostly serves modest neighborhoods. Many new Metro lines quite self-consciously serve a mix of districts. They do this in part to be politically attractive and to forestall accusations that their construction favors either the rich or the poor. Lima’s Metro was quite self-consciously built to serve, first, Villa El Salvador in the south, and then, when its general alignment was finally settled on, San Juan de Lurigancho in the north. Villa El Salvador and San Juan de Lurigancho are both huge settlements of (with some exceptions) poor or middle-income people. Villa El Salvador started life as a pueblo jóven (squatter settlement) and is famous for its local activists. San Juan de Lurigancho has a million people, few of whom are wealthy. “Public” transport at both ends of the lines was largely in private hands before the arrival of the Metro and mostly involved vans (“combis”) that travelled only when very full. Combi transport was (and is) neither rapid nor comfortable, and the Metro’s routing was in part determined by the very reasonable desire to improve transport for a large number of people.

The Metro does skirt the far edges of Miraflores and San Isidro, upscale residential neighborhoods and the centers of much of Lima’s modern commercial life. There are two or three stations within three or four kilometers of these neighborhoods, notably La Cultura and San Borja Sur. La Cultura, where the National Library and the Museo de la Nación (but hardly any residences) are located, is connected with San Isidro by freeway. There are bus routes to San Isidro, but the three-kilometer walk is not pleasant. I also walked from Miraflores to San Borja Sur station. The first part of this journey is fine. As in other big Latin American cities, the most bustling, pedestrian-friendly parts of Lima are upscale commercial/residential neighborhoods. But the last kilometer, past large single-family homes with three-meter-high walls topped by electric fences, is somewhat strange. The only other pedestrians were deliverymen, who were communicating with residents by intercom. The Metro does not have the same kind of easy relationship with its surrounding neighborhoods—and perhaps especially its well-off neighborhoods—that one would find in a European city. Even in the poorer neighborhoods, where there are more pedestrians, you often have to cross a major street to get to the station.

[4] The Metro took nearly thirty years to build. Construction was started in 1986, during a brief period of optimism about Peru’s future, and a small section of surface track at what is now the southern end of the line opened in 1990. Since it didn’t go anywhere very useful, it attracted few passengers. Work on the line practically ceased for twenty years, a period when Peru was experiencing out-of-control inflation, the Sendero Luminoso revolt, and other problems. Work resumed in 2009, and the southern two-thirds of the line were completed in an astonishing 18 months. The northern third, which had not even been started previously, opened 33 months later, in 2014, 28 years after Metro construction had begun.

[5] The Metro has BRT competition. Besides finishing the Metro, Peru’s government took advantage of the good economic times of the early 21st century to build a bus rapid transit route, confusingly called the Metropolitano.³ Unlike the Metro, it serves the Centro Histórico, Miraflores, and San Isidro, running down the center of a freeway, the Vía Expresa, from south of the Centro Histórico to Barranco, a bit beyond Miraflores. This part of the route is genuine, high-quality BRT, resembling the major lines in Bogotá. The bus right-of-way is completely separate. It includes passing lanes, permitting express service. You pay with a smart card as you enter a station. North and south of the Vía Expresa, the Metropolitano still has its own right-of-way, and you still prepay your fare, but buses do have to contend with traffic lights. The Metropolitano has been drawing approximately as many riders as the Metro. The Metropolitano route, oddly, does not intersect with the Metro at any point.

There seems to be a consensus that Lima’s Metro is a success. It has been attracting approximately 350,000 passengers a day on weekdays and Saturdays, more than had been predicted. This is a respectable figure for a single line in an urban area of medium density. Trains, unfortunately, run very full, but that of course is a sign of success, and surveys suggest that passengers are generally pleased. The fares, 1.50 soles (USD 0.45), cover something like two-thirds the cost of running the trains, so the subsidies required are not ruinous. Linea 1 is considered so successful that two additional lines are now under contract. Both will be subways and one will serve the Centro Histórico (the other line will reach the Airport). Linea 2 will cross Linea 1 at Miguel Grau and the Metropolitano at its Estación Central, thus improving connectivity enormously. Additional routes, including lines to Miraflores and San Isidro, are on the drawing boards. If and when these lines are completed Lima’s Metro will be much more like Latin America’s other major rail rapid transit systems.

The São Paulo metropolitan area is by most measures the largest or second largest in the Western Hemisphere,¹ but it doesn’t have a very distinct image in North America or Europe. In so far as most foreigners think of São Paulo at all, it’s often as a congested, polluted, and crime-ridden place. This image is not completely inaccurate. São Paulo’s 21 or so million people² own more than seven million cars,³ and traffic jams are frequent. São Paulo is said, as a result, to have more helicopter commuters than any other city in the world. The urban area is surrounded by hills, and air quality can be terrible. Furthermore, the crime rate is indeed high, although it’s been dropping rapidly over the last fifteen years. In 2015 the murder rate was 8.56 per 100,000,⁴ among the lowest murder rates in Brazil, roughly a sixth that in Saint Louis—but twice New York’s.


Academic studies of São Paulo can also present a rather harrowing picture. Perhaps the best-known English-language work on São Paulo is anthropologist Teresa Caldera’s City of Walls,⁵ which depicts a city in which anyone who can has retreated to a gated community and stopped setting foot in socially-mixed public places, leaving the streets to the poor. Some of the extensive Brazilian academic literature on São Paulo also documents the city’s extreme inequalities and intractable planning dilemmas.⁶

Three recent trips to São Paulo suggest that this view is somewhat out of date. Central São Paulo is certainly a gritty place—graffiti are everywhere—but it has a flourishing pedestrian life, healthy public spaces, and pretty good, and improving, public transportation. In the area between, roughly, the old Centro and Itaim Bibi, streets and parks and the rail system are filled with people, apparently of all social classes, and the new ciclovias (bicycle paths) are attracting a fair number of riders.

Particularly impressive is Avenida Paulista, perhaps São Paulo’s symbolically most important street (see photo).

Avenida Paulista is both a business and a shopping street, and there are apartment buildings at its southeastern end. A substantial number of big companies (Citibank, for example) have their headquarters on the street, and there are several shopping malls and numerous other stores as well. It’s also where major political demonstrations take place. The sidewalks are crowded day and night and could hardly feel safer. Under the current administration of prefeito (mayor) Fernando Haddad, the street has been closed to motorized-vehicle traffic on Sundays. Closing Avenida Paulista must have felt roughly as it would feel in Chicago to close North Michigan Avenue and LaSalle Street on Sundays. The street was just jammed on the rather warm dry Sunday when I was there. There were plenty of diversions. Numerous musicians, for example, had set up shop. Hundreds of people were selling things (mostly craft products). Buskers dressed in fantastic costumes were drawing huge crowds. There were dozens of open-air restaurants, many of which were broadcasting the French/Portuguese Euro championship soccer game. There were also vendors of sorvete (ice), agua de coco (coconut water), and numerous other goodies. Children were diverting themselves using updrafts from subway grates to send light objects high in the air. But it’s possible that walking up and down and people-watching were the major activities of Avenida Paulista’s Sunday crowds—and perhaps of those on weekdays too. There may be no better place in the country to see masses of Brazilians in all their variety.

Also striking is the Minhocão [“big worm”] (see photo).

This road, officially the Via Elevada Presidente Costa e Silva, is ordinarily one of the world’s most appalling elevated urban freeways, running only a few meters from apartment buildings in a socially complicated but basically middle-class neighborhood—and said to be one of the factors in the neighborhood’s deterioration. It too has been closed to motorized traffic on Sundays, as well as at night and on late Saturday afternoons. The Minhocão was crowded when I was there, mostly with (often lightly dressed) people walking, running, or bicycling its 3.5 kilometer length. There were also a certain number of picnickers and agua de coco vendors. It’s an incredibly scenic place. You get a startlingly new view of the landscape when you walk along it. Since it has several turns and hills you also get constantly changing views of tall buildings in distant parts of the city as well as of the bustling streets below.

The city’s major inner-city park, Ibirapuera Park, is as crowded as Avenida Paulista (see photo).

The park features a walking/running/bicycling loop, numerous less formal walking paths, basketball, weightlifting, and skating facilities, and several excellent museums. While I acknowledge that I have no way of identifying the social class of people using the park, it’s pretty clear that there are people there from many social groups.

There are, in fact, substantial numbers of pedestrians in most of the middle-class and wealthy residential neighborhoods in central São Paulo. These neighborhoods are densely built-up with apartment buildings, and generally they feel safe, at least by day. But one should not be naïve here. Most high-rise apartment buildings are surrounded by tall fences and have armed guards. And there are places in the Centro such as “Cracolândia” where there are concentrations of down-and-out people on a much larger scale than anything you’d see in, say, the East End of Vancouver or the homeless peoples’ district of downtown Los Angeles. Even if one avoids the favelas (as I did) and skips Cracolândia, the visitor to São Paulo cannot help but notice that there are large numbers of marginalized or just plain poor people in the city. It’s not clear to a foreigner how much of a danger these people pose, but well-off Brazilians clearly think the danger is immense. This fact colors the use of public space in São Paulo and other Brazilian cities. American cities of course have an analogous problem.

There are also some environmental barriers to pedestrian life. Sidewalks are often cracked. There are steep hills to contend with. And, on rainy days, the sewers are overwhelmed. But you encounter these problems in parts of North America and Western Europe too. Central São Paulo is generally a pedestrian-friendly place.

Other non-automotive transportation facilities have improved too.

The Haddad administration has made a major effort to build ciclovias (bicycle paths).⁷ More than 400 km of paths are planned, and most of them are in place. Here’s a map:

I can’t claim that most of the paths in the central city were extremely busy when I was there, but they were certainly attracting users. A newspaper story⁸ suggests what should have surprised no one. Well-off cyclists, mostly living in the center of the city, generally use the paths on weekends, for recreation. Relatively poor people, mostly living in the periphery, use them to get to work, and they do this every day and in substantial numbers.

A few of the paths, along water courses like the Pinheiros River, allow traffic-free movement for quite a distance, but most of the ciclovias run along urban streets. Ciclovias on major streets like Avenida Paulista and Avendida Faria Lima are designed in a way that seems a bit odd to a North American: They are built in the center of the street (see photo). This clearly solves the “dooring” problem and also assures cyclists’ visibility. It may also help at intersections, where special traffic lights for cyclists provide at least some protection from turning motor vehicles. It can be a long wait, though, for the lights to change. São Paulo’s ciclovias are not built for speedy cycling.

The ciclovia program has apparently aroused a huge amount of opposition. Its opponents’ chief argument is that a great deal of money is being spent on facilities that are used by only a tiny number of people. There is surely an element of truth here, and the expansion of the program has been halted for the moment.

Bicycle paths have recently been built in many other Latin American cities too, for example, Mexico City and Buenos Aires. In many ways ciclovias seem an odd fit for big Latin American cities, where traffic can be heavy and drivers have a reputation for being particularly aggressive. But, in fact, aggressive driving is far less of a problem for cyclists—and pedestrians—than in, say, Middle Eastern or South or Southeast Asian cities. Traffic lights in Latin America are usually obeyed, and sidewalks are normally free of motorized traffic, although you certainly do have to be careful at corners. The ciclovia program in São Paulo and its counterparts in other large Latin American cities seem like exceptionally worthy attempts to reduce the role of the automobile in big cities.

São Paulo’s improving—and still growing—rail transit system is surely of even greater importance than its ciclovia program. Here’s a map:

All the trains I rode were in good shape. São Paulo’s newest subway line, Linha 4 (the Yellow Line), with its platform doors, its open gangways between cars, its free wifi, and its ubiquitous television monitors, is particularly impressive. In appearance it’s much more like the well-funded, recently built subway lines in Asia and Europe than any other subway line in the Western Hemisphere (see photo).

São Paulo is also (I believe) the only large city in the Western Hemisphere that has fully integrated its old suburban lines and its subway system. Although the rail lines and the two different subway companies have retained their separate corporate identities, elaborate passageways have been built to connect the systems (see photo), and one ticket gets you just about anywhere you want to go.

It’s true that the old rail lines, like rail lines in most places that were built originally for long-distance transport, sometimes pass rather uselessly through declining industrial areas in the inner city, but they also serve many busy commercial areas (like Avenida Faria Lima and Avenida Luís Carlos Berrini) and of course numerous suburbs that the subway lines don’t reach. The fares—the subject of recent protests—are not strikingly low given the modest salaries for unskilled work. A subway ticket costs $R3.80 (around $US1.20), less if you pay by smart card, but it’s $R5.92 if you need to transfer to a bus. The counterargument is that the one city/one fare policy ends up being a subsidy for the mostly poor people who live in the periphery.

São Paulo’s subway system proper, with 74 route-kilometers, is still rather small given the size of the city, but it attracts more riders per kilometer of track than any other Western Hemisphere metro system, perhaps in part because of its tie-in with the suburban rail lines.⁹

São Paulo has, in other words, been an enthusiastic participant in the nearly worldwide movement to reduce the role of the automobile in urban life. It’s also clear that some of the negative stereotypes of life in São Paulo are at the very least exaggerated. I can’t claim to be an expert on the city, and I’m perfectly willing to admit that I don’t have much experience at all in the newer suburbs or in the periphery in general, which may well be as pedestrian-unfriendly as in most places. But the central city broadly defined—which covers quite a substantial area—seems to be quite a vibrant, reasonably walkable, and reasonably safe place that, despite the current recession, has been reducing its level of automobile dependence at least modestly in recent years.


I had lived in Chicago for thirty years, and I like trains, but I’d never gone and taken a look at the Chicago area’s only streetcar line, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. So I set out one Sunday afternoon on Chicago’s suburban railroad system, Metra, to visit Kenosha. It was a pretty easy hour-and-forty-minute trip, past familiar cityscape for a while, then along a bicycle trail through well-off suburbs, and finally (and much more speedily) through increasingly open country. Kenosha may in some senses be a suburb of Chicago, but there is plenty of unbuilt-on land close to the state border.

The Kenosha streetcar runs for a mile or so between the Metra station and the Lakefront. Its complete route is a loop, said to be two miles long in all.

Its development was justified on the grounds that the line would serve the inhabitants of Harbor Park, a relatively new townhouse condo development on the Lakefront. The Kenosha streetcar seems to have been an abysmal failure at attracting Harbor Park customers though. The current schedule—7.5 hours a day starting at 10 or 11 for most of the year but on weekends only in winter—would not allow commuters to use it. To get to the Loop by 9 you’d have to take a train at 7:13 or earlier, and the first train from the Loop after 5 wouldn’t get you home until 6:38 or later. Clearly the streetcar line has become essentially a tourist attraction and a modest one at that. The latest figures (2014) from the American Public Transit Association (APTA) suggest that there are 45,054 passengers/year, or maybe 140/day (and you wonder how Kenosha Transit counts people who buy a day pass; if you make several round trips on a day pass, does each one-way ride count as an unlinked trip?). When I was there only one PCC car was running. It was taking about ten minutes to complete a loop, that is, making maybe 45 round trips, or ninety one-way trips/day. That means that there were something like 1.5 passengers per trip. Actually, I was struck by the complete absence of passengers on the Sunday afternoon I visited. There were, however, people out photographing the nicely repainted PCC cars, of which Kenosha Transit has acquired six. To someone who likes trains, it’s quite appealing to see these PCC cars running in a small city. It’s not clear that the cars have much to do with urban transit, however.

The Metra trains, interestingly, were just jammed, especially the late afternoon train back from Kenosha to Chicago. There were standees between Ravinia Park and Ravenswood. But the train wasn’t just serving people attending a Ravinia event. People got on and off at every one of the 27 stops. Perhaps there should be more than nine trains a day on Sunday! It was certainly interesting to contrast a transit service that is filling a real need with one that seems to be serving mostly an aesthetic one. The Kenosha streetcar is, admittedly, probably bringing in some tourist dollars, perhaps enough to justify the $6.37 subsidy per passenger trip (but note that, according to APTA, Metra’s tickets—almost always for a much longer journey—are subsidized at only $4.93/ride).

Delhi has added more rail transit in the 21st century than any other city outside of East Asia. Although the first line did not open until 2002, there are now 190 route kilometers and 2.4 million riders a day. Among North American rail transit lines, only the New York subway is longer and carries more passengers. And the Delhi subway is still growing. Phase III, now being constructed, will add 160 route kilometers. In a few years Delhi will have one of the world’s largest rail transit systems. Delhi Metro is generally considered an enormous success, not least because the lines were apparently built efficiently, with a minimum of corruption, in a country where this is not the norm.


I’ve been on the Delhi Metro twice, on an earlier trip in 2007 and just recently. There are all sorts of tremendously impressive things about the system. The underground stations and the trains are air-conditioned—a fairly important accomplishment given that temperatures in Delhi were well over 100 degrees every day I was there. The stations are quite spacious and subtly lit (they remind me of stations on the Washington Metro). The trains are very much of the modern type. You can walk from car to car. It is true that there are plenty of reminders that you’re in India. The trains can get awfully crowded (except for the women’s car). And passengers getting on seem incapable of waiting for passengers to get off, and there is thus lots of pushing and shoving. Also, it’s a bit unnerving that you have to get your luggage x-rayed and undergo a body search to enter a station (on one day I had to take out every object from a crowded backpack for a zealous guard). Furthermore, there are frequent announcements warning passengers against picking up unattended objects since they could be bombs. Still, who could argue with the proposition that Delhi Metro is a major achievement?

I have one pretty major caveat, however. It’s that it’s practically impossible to walk to the Metro stations, at least in central Delhi.

When I first rode the Delhi Metro in 2007, I decided to follow the elevated line that emerges a few blocks west of Connaught Circle, to take pictures and to get a feel for how the line fit into the neighborhoods it passed through. I gave up after a couple of stations. One problem is the near absence of sidewalks along the route (see below). In most cases a sidewalk had once been built, but it’s been encroached on in places and has not been maintained in others, so that there is more trash-filled pothole than sidewalk. Most Indians just walk in the traffic lane. Even more serious, you take your life in your hands every time you want to cross a street. There are few traffic lights, and little attention is paid to those that exist. Some Indian intellectuals say they hate the anthropologist Louis Dumont’s phrase “homo hierarchicus,” an attempt to characterize the Indian people in light of the caste system. But there is no doubt that there is a hierarchy on Indian roads. Third World traffic rules are in force everywhere. The larger vehicle has the right of way, and pedestrians have no rights at all. Even though automobile ownership is not that high, Delhi is one of the most pedestrian-unfriendly cities in the world—especially British-planned New Delhi with its innumerable roundabouts. You end up wondering just how people get to the Metro stations (or anywhere else). A surprising number take auto or bicycle rickshaws short distances just to avoid having to walk. There may be fewer pedestrians in central Delhi than in any other large city anywhere. There are many fewer pedestrians in the blocks around around Connaught Circle than in, say, downtown Los Angeles, which is famous in North America for being a car-oriented place. In downtown Los Angeles paved sidewalks are universal, and you can cross streets safely.

I visited Gurgaon on my last trip to Delhi. Gurgaon is Delhi’s Rosslyn or Schaumburg or La Défense. Many successful firms have built high-rise office buildings in Gurgaon. There’s also a huge amount of middle- and upper-class housing. A new elevated Metro line to one of Gurgaon’s major office complexes just opened a couple of months ago. It connects to a branch of the Metro that opened approximately a year ago. Both lines were jammed despite the fact that service is frequent, and I had to stand all the way back to central Delhi. But even in shiny-new Gurgaon it’s painful to get to the stations. There are numerous pedestrians in Gurgaon’s office district—and almost no provision made for them. You often have to walk in moving traffic or across muddy fields to get where you’re going (see below).

Some Indians attribute the pedestrian-unfriendliness of Indian cities to cultural factors other than the caste system. It is certainly true that Indians on the whole are probably less interested in fitness than just about any of the world’s peoples. You almost never see runners or recreational bicyclists in Indian residential districts. Still, there are plenty of middle-class Indians who enjoy walking. Small parks all over urban India have de facto tracks where people walk in circles. I spent a couple of hours on my last trip to Delhi in Lodi Garden, a wonderful park in New Delhi that contains several enormous centuries-old tombs; lots of large trees (and therefore shade); and thousands of noisy birds. It may be the most pleasant place in Delhi. And it’s just big enough to contain an approximately one-mile walking loop. Amazingly, there were a very large number of people there making the circuit, including some women (see below). It’s true that the park also has a substantial population of unowned dogs, but they do seem to let people pretty much alone (although they can bark furiously at owned dogs being walked on leashes). Clearly, some Indians would walk to Metro stations if it were easier to do so.

Delhi of course is hardly the only Third World city where pedestrians are treated with contempt. But, unlike its close competitors in this area (Jakarta and Hanoi, for example), it has made a substantial investment in a form of transport that appears to function fully only when pedestrian access is possible. It’s true that, even as it is, Delhi’s subway is working for millions of people. But a sympathetic foreigner can’t help but wonder whether it wouldn’t be even more of a success if something were done about making it less of an ordeal to walk to the stations. I acknowledge that it would not be a trivial matter to change India’s driving culture—or its long-standing indifference to keeping sidewalks clear.

–May 2014