On August 17, Jorge Enrique Robledo, candidate for mayor of Bogota for the Dignity and Commitment party, announced at a press conference his decision to reach a process of zero fare in all public transportation in case he is elected in the upcoming elections.

He explained how this decision is the result of a rigorous analysis by a specialized team based on two basic principles: one, that the social conditions for access to the right to decent public transportation are very restrictive and, two, that in order to achieve this, State funding is required, as is being done in many cities around the world.

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The zero fare proposal is part of the social diagnoses that have characterized former Senator Robledo, and therefore starts from analyzing the situation of poverty of millions of Bogota residents who have to invest up to 30% of their income to pay for the congested, unsafe and expensive TransMilenio service, and that many of those who comply with this payment have to give up two or three meals a day.

Of course, those who prefer to eat have to choose to walk long distances every day – 24% of trips, most of which are made by women -, to ride a bicycle or to sneak into the system, 300,000 offenders who are subject to the inevitable risks due to their evasive attitude and to serious accidents.

It is, undoubtedly, a problem that cannot be reduced to being treated as criminal, because it is undoubtedly of social order. And the middle classes decide to get off the buses to buy a motorcycle or a car, a choice that increases road congestion and environmental pollution.

Therefore, raising bus fares to avoid subsidies from the District would be in the direction of further exacerbating social contradictions and nurturing the breeding ground that favors insecurity.

This postulate that will end up eliminating the restrictions to the right to public transportation is thought within the vision that candidate Robledo has to approach an integral and effective solution to the quality of life of the citizens of Bogota.

The deficient and costly mass transit service impacts the entire mobility of the city, because, in addition to sharing the roads of mixed surface traffic, it has increased the individual vehicle fleet, making Bogota the most congested city in the world.

And it is a city of eleven million inhabitants in its conurbation area, one of the three with that population that in the world does not have a subway, so the candidate is committed to continue with what is contracted and to begin to provide solutions in the short, medium and long term, overcoming that immediatist and biased vision based on occurrences taken out of the sleeve.

Therefore, the zero passage proposed by the aspirant Robledo goes in the direction of satisfying that right that has never existed, in a country where the 1991 Constitution enshrined on paper all rights.

But in practice, this task stumbled with the neoliberal approach that operated in its background to contradictorily go in the direction of violating all of them, because by privileging the profitability of the profit of those who provide the services that should guarantee them, it has deepened the social calamities in all orders, turning the country and its capital into a world with restricted rights, mainly that of dignified mobility.

Candidate Robledo’s zero fare postulate points, therefore, to the other principle that sustains it, which is that the State should be the one to finance this right. It must be said that the District’s coffers already do it with almost three billion pesos -a 55% subsidy to the bus operators and not to the user-, and that the rest should come, in part, from the commercialization of the system -buses and stations- and from citizens’ contributions.

But the Nation, which receives 25% of the national domestic product from Bogotá, should be able to contribute 0.5% to complete these subsidies for public transport. On the other hand, Robledo will strengthen the public service called La Rolita de TransMilenio, which has proven to be more efficient than that of private operators, by eliminating the huge profits, a fact that achieves the reduction of operating costs.

That is why his proposal, among other solutions of a social nature, is to gradually eliminate the cost of fares until 2027 -the last year of his mandate- it will reach zero in the entire transportation system.

This will not only solve the access to the right of mobility and other rights, but the measure will also have an impact on the revival of Bogota’s economy by favoring the consumption of multiple items of the supply of goods and services and strengthening the effort to generate productive enterprises.

If cities in the developed world are already implementing zero fare, where there are not so many restrictions on access to mobility, precisely because they recognize this right, in cities like Bogota, with so many limitations, it is more urgent to implement it, leaving behind the conception that because we are a “developing” country – read underdeveloped – we cannot access the fundamental rights that are enshrined in the Constitution.

Architect Jorge Enrique Esguerra Leongómez

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