All Bogota mayoral candidates agree the capital needs to keep working towards the installation of a metro to fight the congestion of the capital’s traffic, they said in a radio debate Sunday.
Candidates Carlos Fernando Galan, Enrique Peñalosa, Gina Parody, David Luna, Jaime Castro and Gustavo Petro all took part in a national broadcast in which none seemed to abandon the long-delayed plans to start constructing a metro. However, none agreed on how the metro needed to be constructed.
“I will construct the metro,” said Enrique Peñalosa, who leads the polls leading up to the October elections. However, according to the former mayor, the existing mass transit system “Transmilenio transports more passengers than all the metro lines in the world, except for maybe six or seven.”
According to Petro, the runner-up in the polls, Bogota needs at least one metro line running from east to west, crossing the main existing Transmilenio routes.
Parody disagreed with her leftist competitor and proposed the first metro line be built along the Avenida Boyaca that connects the north and the south of the city.
According to Galan, the metro should be built long the Avenida Caracas.
Liberal Party candidate Luna said he wants at least two lines; one connecting the north and another connecting the west to the financial district downtown.
Jaime Castro, like Peñalosa a former mayor of the capital, said the most important thing for the metro would be to connect the capital city with surrounding municipalities.
Bogota, a city of nearly 9 million residents, has been planning a metro for years, but has seen great trouble in the realization of infrastructure works as widespread corruption caused delays in almost all public works and a deterioration of the Transmilenio routes.