‘If you don’t like it, get off and get in a taxi!’: The dilemmas of traveling by bus in Quito

Seven out of every ten inhabitants of Quito use public transport. That is equivalent to about 2 million people who have to get on a bus every day, while at the same time The remaining 800,000 travel in private vehicles, according to the statistics managed by the Ministry of Mobility of the capital municipality.

And yet, that great mass of passengers —which finances a millionaire business every day— is still waiting for a timely, safe and quality service. For many Quiteños, taking the bus is reliving the times of your parents and grandparents, when they had to travel as “potato sacks”, huddled together and scrambled, and crossed themselves as they felt the driver accelerate, pass, fly. It still happens. And woe to the one who dares to claim …

According to the latest report delivered by the Ministry of Mobility, in the city 3,082 buses circulate, grouped into 65 operators.

The problem is that, of this total, one year after the municipal ordinance came into effect, just eight (which add up to 800 units, that is, a quarter of the total number of buses) have met the minimum quality requirements required by the Municipality to authorize the ticket hike, from $ 0.25 to $ 0.35.

The 57 operators remaining (they cover 75% of buses that run through the capital) still fail to exceed technical requirements and, therefore, they cannot raise the rate and must continue to charge $ 0.25.

Requirements and rate increase

In the administration of former mayor Jorge Yunda, who was removed by the Metropolitan Council, Ordinance 017-2020 was approved, which established a series of quality criteria in order to allow the evaluation of the cases in which a increase of the passage.

To do this, they are five parameters those that the operators have to comply with: reliability, security, efficiency, comfort and accessibility. And to reach optimal levels they must install devices (such as GPS sensors, digital tachographs that report on the journey, kilometers traveled, speed and breaks), security cameras, passenger counters and a software that transmit in real time the information of each bus.

In total, the Municipality requires operators to compliance with 23 technical indicators.

The representatives of the cooperatives that have not managed to even come close to such demands point out that, although there are serious deficiencies in the service, the passage of $ 0.25 – in force since January 2003 – is insufficient to cover costs of operation.

This has caused a vicious circle that has not been resolved for years: on the side of the drivers it is said that, if there is no increase in tickets, it is impossible to make improvements; While on the side of the Municipality, if the requirements are not met, there is simply no authorization for a hike.

The disagreement has also become a bottleneck that prevents continuing with the project of transformation of the capital’s public transport, that has the metro (still no start date) as its axis. Once all 65 operators meet the requirements, it is intended to agglutinate them in fourteen associations or subsystems that are administered by a trust of the Municipality.

The idea is, for example, that Carriers are paid per kilometer traveled and not per passenger, and what do I know reorganize the route and frequency system to integrate it depending on the stops and route of the metro. That could help, at the very least, ease drivers’ quarrels over passengers.

Reactions

The citizen initiative Quito How We Go, which has carried out analyzes and studies on the city, maintains that the crisis in mobility is also due to “a disorderly growth of the city towards the valleys and urban peripheries, together with pernicious laws passed in the nineties that prevented the supply of public transportation from responding to population growth ”.

For Guillermo Abad, former Secretary of Mobility, it is important to maintain this project requiring minimum quality criteria to provide a jump in the public transport system, “which has not moved for 50 years”.

“Although it is the starting point, there is still a long way to go to optimize the public transport system,” says Abad.

Without explanation

The Municipality of Quito, in 2021, allocated for the mobility sector $ 192 million, of which $ 2 million were earmarked for the respective secretariat, $ 51 million for the Passenger Company (Trolleybus, Ecovía and their feeders), $ 11 million for the Quito Metro (as it has a separate additional allocation).

In the budget proforma for 2022 it was proposed to allocate $ 175 million, a 9% decrease. However, this proforma is still under analysis by the Metropolitan Council and must be approved until December 10.

EL UNIVERSO requested an interview last week with the Secretary of Mobility, Ricardo Alberto Pozo, to discuss the perspectives and concrete actions to solve the problems of public transport in Quito. However, at the close of this report, there was no response.

Citizen monitoring

The social networks have become platforms to report abuse. There are videos in which it is seen that the buses star races to arrive first to the stops and gain passengers. Also registered are confrontations between drivers and helpers, or the moments when traffic laws are run over, putting the lives of passengers and passersby at risk. So much so that, in the latest communications about this type of complaint, the Municipality has included, as a commonplace, the phrase “before a video broadcast on networks” and then add the respective actions.

Abraham Paillacho, a 42-year-old private worker, lives in the Quitumbe sector, in the south of the city. He is outraged by cost versus benefit of public transportation. He remembers that on one occasion he complained to the driver of a bus for not respecting the capacity and demanded that he not continue picking up passengers. “If you don’t like it, get out and get in a taxi!”.

Public transportation in Quito “is lousy. Usually the buses are racing each other; it is dangerous because sometimes children travel alone and hit each other … Another bad thing is the dirt; on one occasion, I even found a bus full of blood ”, he regrets Andrea Chavez, University student. However, something stands out: that, unlike what happened in the past, most bus drivers already respect the stops and they usually stop only there.

Andrea considers that, anyway, the passage in Quito is cheap, and that is just a small increase. “More if we compare with other places, such as Manabí, where it costs $ 0.40 (urban transport).”

Galo trujillo, manager of the Yaruquí Passenger Transport Cooperative, stressed that the parish buses have also been 18 years old asking for an increase in the rate. “In addition, with the rise in the cost of diesel, the situation is more complicated,” he says.

The manager of Compañía de Transporte Guadalajara SA, Pablo Lima, believes that the improvement does not depend only on the rate increase and that the drivers comply with their obligations, but of the opening of the authority, the service of the carrier and the user respect.

“For example, at least one window on a vehicle is acid-graphite; those who scratch and vandalize the units are the users”, Criticizes. He adds that the solution also depends on the collaboration and respect of passengers, as well as the authorities, who must be promoters of a culture of harmony. (I)