Bogota Blogger

Drivers in Bogota are crazy. Motorcyclists in Bogota are worse.

Motorcyclists are allowed to ride between lanes of traffic, and they take every opportunity to do so. Two of my American friends from work have bought motorcycles, and they ride them every day. (One of them, though, dresses up in what almost amounts to a suit of armor every time he gets on his bike.) The advantage is that pico y placa (see previous post) doesn’t apply to motorcycles, and of course the gas mileage is great.

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Bogota’s a pretty good city for cycling, as big cities go.

Ciclovia

The best thing it has going on is called Ciclovia, which happens when several of the major streets throughout the city are closed on Sundays and holidays from 7:00 AM till 2:00 PM and it’s cyclists (mostly), roller bladers, and walkers only. All kinds of people show up, whole families sometimes, people running, walking, blading.  There’s a separate post on Ciclovia.

Ciclorutas

Ciclorutas are bike lanes. There is a series of them throughout the city, and they do a fairly good (though not excellent) job of connecting to one another. 

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Taxis in Bogota are tiny little Korean cars, and they crawl around the city like ants.   But, just try to get one on a Friday between 6:00 and 8:00.  Taxis are cheap in the city (way cheaper in other cities), and usually plentiful.  There are a lot of ins and outs though.

Most people will tell you not to take taxis off the street, and instead to call them.  I would say the same thing, and then turn around and take one off the street.  Lots of times you just have to.  But if you’re home or in a restaurant, it’s just as easy, and definitely safer, to call one.  There was a time when taking a taxi off the street was an invitation to get kidnapped or robbed, and while that’s mostly not the case anymore, it still happens. 

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There would seem to be a lot of cars in this city, but I have read that some small percentage of people own cars here.  Certainly very few poor people do.  People here have either the smallest cars possible (so they can fit in all the small parking spaces and squeeze between lanes of traffic) or huge SUV’s (because the roads suck so badly that this is the only way to get a semi-smooth ride).  So, there aren’t really any sedan-type cars that you see all over the US.  I would also say that I RARELY see luxury cars except occasionally SUV’s…that apparently stems from the days when showing off your wealth led to kidnapping.

Parking spaces are TINY everywhere in this city. Almost all the apartment buildings in the north have garages underground, and each space is just about big enough for the car to barely fit in and open the doors on one side, but not both.

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This was my longest bus ride ever, and I was excited to do it just to see what these rides are like, because most Colombians travel mostly by bus.  There are just about no trains other than a few local ones, and domestic air travel is expensive.  It costs more to fly most places than just about any round trip you could imagine in the US, even coast to coast, and this is even worse when you consider that most flights within Colombia are an hour or two at most.  The typical Colombian could never afford to get on an airplane.

Why 19 hours?  Most of the populated sections of Colombia are in the Andes, which pretty much cover the entire Western part of the country.  So, travelling from city to city, often you average only about 25 miles per hour.

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There are two airports in Bogota–El Dorado, which is for international flights and for domestic airlines other then Avianca, and Puente Aereo, which is for Avianca domestic flights only (Avianca has a near monopoly on domestic flights).  They are situated right next to each other.  

First I’ll talk about El Dorado.  Supposedly there is a plan to build a new terminal sometime (when???!?!??).  The airport is kind of dated and drab, and some of their systems are not quite up-to-the-minute.  I have read more than once that the entire city is being held back from becoming more of an international player because of the lack of a really good international airport with systems in place that international business travellers insist on.  But for me, a simple worker/tourist, it works okay, though it’s definitely a nothing-special airport.

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Avianca is the largest airline in Colombia, and operates a near-monopoly on many routes.   Supposedly it is owned by a Brazililan firm, and when I talk to Colombians I work with about how badly their service sucks, they always say something to the effect of:  “Oh, you should have seen it five years ago.  The improvements are amazing.”

The thing is, once you make it to the plane, everything is wonderful.  It’s the getting there that is the problem.  Begin with the website.  I actually know the guy who wrote the code for the website, and he’s very frustrated that Avianca won’t keep in maintained.  On any given day, you simply cannot buy a ticket online, and lots of times can’t even follow through to the price if you are checking flights.  It just goes in circles.  Not to mention that the information is frustratingly arranged, so that lots of times you can’t get answers.

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I think that one of the coolest things that happens in Bogota is the Dia Sin Carros, or Day Without Cars.  This is one day a year, in February, when no private vehicles are allowed on the streets between 6:00AM and 7:00PM.  While it cuts down on pollution, both air and noise, for the day, the purpose has more to do with reminding people to think about their relationships to their cars, and to the environment, and to possibly get more of a mindset towards trying to be more friendly to the ecology.  Can you imagine this happening in the US???

Now, on this day, buses, commecial vehicles, and taxis are still allowed to be on the roads.  These vehicles are all easily identified by the license plates that they must have painted on both sides and the roof.  Of course, the normally crowded buses are even MORE crowded this day, and taxi drivers have maybe their biggest day of the year.  But also, people walk a few blocks, or even a few miles, that they might normally have driven.  I live five blocks from my local grocery, and I always walk because I have 365 dias sin carro per year, but my neighbor who ALWAYS drives to the grocery will walk on that particular day.   Then, he might realize that walking is not so bad, good exercise, kind of pleasant, and decide to try to do it more often.  That’s how this day helps.

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When we arrived at the San Gil bus station last Friday, we immediately set out to buy return tickets, because we were not able to get them in Bogota, and since it was a puente, we were afraid maybe we wouldn’t get seats to come home. But it turns out there were a lot of options, so we bought tickets with a different bus compay, called Copetran, because they had the most convenient time for us.

But when we got to the bus station the next Monday, it turns out there were lots of companies trying to sell tickets to Bogota, and it would have been possible to get a 20-30% discount if we were buying the tickets on the spot. Out Copetran bus didn’t show up by the time we were supposed to leave, and the way things work in Colombia, it could have been many more hours before it showed. In fact, they were advertising a 2:00PM trip, when our trip was supposed to be at 1:00PM, which was pretty much admitting that they never intended to leave at 1:00.

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This is a fact of life in Bogota, at almost any time of day. But that’s true of any large city, right??

Still, Bogota is probably unique in some of the unusual causes of trancon and in some of the possible solutions that are NOT implemented.

First, there?s the matter of the carts being pulled by horses or by humans that travel on any street they choose–even the autopista, the largest highway in the country.?? Of course, a vehicle taking up a lane that is traveling about 3 kilometers per hour is going to slow things down a bit.

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