Atencion San Miguel
By Jesús Ibarra
San Miguel has suffered an increasing traffic and parking problem for a long time. Its narrow and steep streets make the circulation of cars, and especially of local buses, commonly known as urbanos, difficult. The constantly increasing number of vehicles moving through downtown streets makes driving in Centro more difficult each day. Adolfo Cervantes, head of the local Transit Department, spoke with Atención about his plans for improving the circulation of vehicles in San Miguel.
Jesús Ibarra: Have you thought of a solution for the different traffic problems in the city?
Adolfo Cervantes: San Miguel is different from any other city because of its history and its topography, so it cannot copy any other traffic model. I had the great fortune of meeting Mr. Ivar Shacke, a Danish resident in San Miguel, shortly after this administration took office. He is an expert in traffic management and worked for many years with the Danish government. He is also an assistant to the vice-secretary of the Secretaría de Comunicaciones (Communications Department) in Mexico City and of the president of the Comisión Nacional para la Prevención de Accidentes (National Commission for Accident Prevention). He started voluntarily assisting me in technical traffic matters. I meet with him every Wednesday, and he has shown me several things that might be useful for improving the traffic situation in San Miguel.
JI: What are those things?
AC: One thing we have done is implement a Public Transport Policy in which we included the changes to be made regarding traffic and transportation in San Miguel. This document is intended to be a social contract between residents and authorities, so that everyone is working in just one direction. The priority is pedestrians. We don’t have enough resources to pave streets, but we may create sidewalks.
JI: What about public transportation?
AC: That is another important point. We have started working toward a high-quality public transportation service. A very professional company is doing a study of the public transportation service. This study will specify the characteristics of buses, the routes and frequencies they have to follow. We are thinking of introducing some small buses for 20 people that would travel through Centro. The larger buses would have routes in the surrounding areas. We would implement prepaid systems; people will buy a card they can use to travel all around San Miguel. Even people who have cars could leave them at home and use these new buses.
JI: Do the public transport concessionaires agree with this project?
AC: We have had meetings with the public transport owners to try to explain to them that it is important they stop being concessionaires and form serious companies. There are a lot of disadvantages to these concessions, among them that there is no a real training for drivers and there is a lot of competition among the different groups. The bus drivers start working at 6am and finish at 10pm, and they earn 200 pesos a day without social insurance or any other benefit. The drivers do not have any training, and this causes frequent failures in the system, which affects the cost. So, the concessionaires do not earn what they ought to. It has been calculated that there are around 50,000 passengers per day, which would mean an income of 250,000 pesos a day.
The company has a department that is in charge of speaking with the concessionaires to explain the advantages they would have if they associated with only one company. In this way they could achieve credits or financing. We already have one registered company in San Miguel, that of Los Rodríguez, which manages around 14 buses. We will ask for three conditions to ensure quality: punctual service, clean buses and polite drivers.
JI: Parking is also serious problem.
AC: I don’t hold with the idea of building an underground parking lot. We will propose two options: that parking lots offer low long-term parking fees for residents of around 300 pesos a month and that drivers leave their vehicles at home or on the outside of downtown and use public transportation.
JI: When will we start to see these changes?
AC: We are planning to start implementing the new public transportation system in June or July.
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