***** The New York Times May 20, 2002, Monday, Late Edition - Final SECTION: Section A; Page 4; Column 3; Foreign Desk HEADLINE: Mexico City Journal; It's a First-Class Gridlock, but No Easier to Unlock BYLINE: By TIM WEINER DATELINE: MEXICO CITY, May 19
Rush hour is an oxymoron in this impossible metropolis. It takes two hours to crawl across town. The city is choking on the fumes from three million private cars, 150,000 taxis and 100,000 buses.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is, God help him, the mayor of the capital, home to roughly 20 million people, a fifth of the nation. He would like to be Mexico's next president. If he could solve Mexico City's traffic problems, he could probably be elected emperor. So should he extend the astoundingly cheap and efficient subway system, or start a billion-dollar project to turn the city's busiest roads into double-decker highways?
That is not a simple question. The answer involves money and politics, of course, but also questions of race and class.
"What is the best way to ease congestion?" said Dr. Mario J. Molina, a Mexico City native, Nobel Prize-winning scientist and consultant to Mexico's City's government. "It's a classic dilemma: when you build more highways, do you decrease pollution or increase traffic? The only way to solve it is to increase public transportation."
The mayor first chose the highway route, with a plan to add a second story to the city's two most heavily traveled roads, the Periferico and the Viaducto, where the average speed is now seven miles per hour. His administration says that if there is more space on the roads and cars can move more freely, pollution will decrease.
Construction was to have started this month, promising years of chaos and providing a chance for even more cars to complicate life in this megacity. Last week, Mayor Lopez Obrador tapped the brakes: the cost and complexity may cause cause him to scale down the project, adding a double deck only to the most choked sectors of the city.
But he is also planning the first expansion of the subway system in years, though a relatively modest one: four more miles of track that could serve an additional 250,000 people, most of them poor.
The subway costs 20 cents and traverses the heart of the city in 20 minutes. Figures compiled by New York City's transit authority show the Mexico City subway system tied with New York's for fourth place among the world's busiest, with 1.3 billion riders a year. (Moscow, with 3.2 billion, takes the gold, followed by Tokyo and Seoul.)
The argument in Mexico City over whether to build more roads or better mass transit breaks down sharply along class lines. People who are richer -- and, to put it bluntly, whiter, with more Spanish than Indian blood -- tend to favor the idea of the double-decker highways. People who are poorer and browner would like to have more Metro lines.
"The lower you go in the social scale, the more people use public transportation," said the city's environmental coordinator, Claudia Sheinbaum. "Richer people prefer to use private cars."
Manuel Sanchez, 36, is a chauffeur for a rich family in a far-flung suburb of the city. His daily commute lasts four hours, and he spends much of his working day in traffic.
"The second deck isn't going to solve anything, except give people a reason to use the cars that they don't use now because there's too much traffic," Mr. Sanchez said. "The more roads they build, the more cars will appear.
"The children will use the second car -- the mothers, the fathers. It's too much.
"The Metro is a magnificent system," he added. "It's fast, safe and doesn't pollute. Lopez Obrador should be thinking of more ways to expand it."
But the subway is beneath many middle-class Mexicans, who refuse to ride it because the poor people do.
"People on the Metro push and shove," said Francisco Estrada, 41, a theater technician. "And they smell like onions."
Santiago Creuheras, 28, an economic development officer for the city, said simply, if a bit sniffily, "The Metro is for people who don't have cars."
Owning a car is the only sure sign in Mexico that one has arrived in the middle class. For decades, there has been one car in Mexico that striving people could afford, and only one: the Volkswagen Beetle.
At a cost of less than $8,000, the "Bocho," or Bug, has been the key to the highway for the masses in Mexico for many years. The old Beetle is still manufactured in Mexico -- a plant in Puebla is the only one in the world still making the classic car in its original form -- and hundreds of thousands are on this city's streets.
Most of the cars in the city's taxi fleet are also Beetles, many of them old and in poor repair. Part of the mayor's transportation strategy is a $10 million program of credits and subsidies to persuade taxi drivers to trade in their old Beetles for four-door cars with higher environmental and fuel-efficiency standards.
Ms. Sheinbaum says she is convinced that the double-decker highway will lead to less pollution, even if it leads to more cars, by allowing traffic to move more freely.
"Mexico City is so densely populated right now, our traffic and congestion problems are so bad, that we have to have more roads," she said. "You can only expand one of two ways: expropriate land for more streets, ripping up trees and waterways, or build a second floor for the highways."
"We hope to have reduced atmospheric pollution and increased the average velocity in the city," she added -- if the money holds out and the project is completed by the target date of 2006, which happens to be the year of the next presidential election.
"Life in the city will be better," she said, hopefully.
Mr. Estrada, the theater technician, has his doubts, though.
"There are," he said, "simply too many people in this city in too little space."
GRAPHIC: Photos: Commuting is something of an upstairs-downstairs affair in Mexico City where car ownership brings a certain status. Similarly, ideas for easing congestion: the wealthy want more roads while the poor prefer rail. (Photographs by Jorge Nunez for The New York Times) ***** -- Yoshie
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