It’s Thursday and it’s 9:00 in the morning. In the subway station there are no workers running to get to their offices on time. Neither are students, children or the elderly.
It is a large open platform, with walls decorated by sculptures of abstract shapes of various colors. It’s clean, it looks modern. And every 12 minutes it receives two silver cars inside which a few passengers can be seen.
Among the cement benches of Jardines, as the Urban Train stop we are at is called, located in Bayamón, a city in the northern metropolitan area of Puerto Rico, only one security guard walks around.
The man watches over an empty room.
In appearance, this metro system has nothing to envy of any other similar transport in the world. Its seasons are very similar to each other. Large in size and have parking lots that could accommodate hundreds of cars.
Some stations, depending on the time of day, are busier than Jardines. It happens, for example, with one located at the University of Puerto Rico, frequented in the mornings and afternoons by students, and in another near the José Miguel Agrelot Coliseum, the largest concert hall on the island, every time an artist performs a presentation.
But in general, the Tren Urbano, considered one of the most important infrastructure works in the modern history of Puerto Rico, and which was built under the premise that it would reduce the enormous dependence on automobiles of the island’s population, does not comply with its initial expectations almost 20 years after its inauguration.
“It is a train that goes nowhere,” Aiola Virella, editorial director of the local newspaper Metro, says in an interview from her office in San Juan.
During her time as a reporter, Virella specialized in covering infrastructure issues. The Urban Train, which began to be built in the 1990s, was its main topic for years.
He affirms that the subway, which cost US$2.25 billion and that Puerto Rico financed mainly with the issuance of debt that it still must pay, in theory works, but errors in its planning, including a short and inconvenient route, do not make it attractive for the population.
It was expected to move 125,000 people every day through a network of tracks that run between elevated and underground areas. In contrast, last 2022, according to local government figures, it received an average of 6,000 passengers daily.
It had the mission of serving as a central artery around which buses, taxis and bicycles would operate in connection with pedestrian areas. It would also connect with the collective transportation systems of rural cities.
But this never happened. On the contrary, Puerto Ricans, during peak traffic hours in the dense capital of San Juan, are forced to spend hours in traffic jams.
“Everyone depends on the car, there is no other option,” adds Virella.
His words are reflected in the figures. Of the little more than 3.2 million inhabitants that the United States has, the Department of Transportation registered for 2021 about 2.1 million drivers who, on average, had 1.33 cars each.
And while this is happening, the Tren Urbano is considered one of the least performing trains in the US, receiving US$20 million from the government every year to operate and recovering only 9 cents of each dollar invested.
The dream
Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, Puerto Rico dreamed of a train for its capital.
Although today the island is burdened by a deep fiscal crisis, it was a very different place back then.
After the approval of the Commonwealth status in the mid-20th century, which made it a US territory, the island experienced sustained economic growth for decades.
But, although the feasibility of a train was analyzed, no government took the step to build it. Everything changed in 1990.
“Puerto Rico, like the United States, was going through a moment of economic boom. Everyone felt safe, no one imagined the debt problem that arose years later,” says Virella.
“In that Puerto Rico, the idea of the train was born. A modern one, with constructions that had never been seen here,” he adds.
After new studies and approval from the US federal government, in 1996 work on the Urban Train began.
Its greatest promoter, and who supervised the work for years, was Carlos Pesquera, a structural engineer who served as Secretary of Transportation of Puerto Rico. Now as a businessman, owner of a consulting firm, he receives us at his office in San Juan.
Armed with papers and a huge computer, he works hard to show us tables full of numbers, newspaper clippings and photographs of the train construction process.
“The train was supposed to be built in several phases. In the second, I was going to have some extensions [de su ruta]but it never happened,” he says.
The first and only construction phase consisted of years of complex work, sometimes requiring the closure of entire communities.
“Advisors from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as well as developers, joined in to reconceptualize the train and make it viable. In Puerto Rico there was no experience to create a system like this, there was a learning process,” he says.
“For example, when we were digging, we found sanitary pipes. Many expenses were due to unforeseen situations,” she adds.
The Urban Train ended up being a heavy metro, with 16 stations, that travels 11.6 kilometers between three towns in the northern part of Puerto Rico: San Juan, Bayamón and Guaynabo.
And although it has key stops, such as the Medical Center, the most important hospital in Puerto Rico, it does not reach core places for the population and tourism, such as the international airport, the colonial area of Old San Juan, important shopping centers or densely populated neighborhoods. towns in the metropolitan area.
The original plans, which estimated its cost at US$1.5 billion, also contemplated that its enormous facilities would be full of businesses and that housing complexes would be developed in the surrounding areas.
The facilities of the train, finally opened in 2004, largely do not have shops and very few are surrounded by houses or apartments.
There are different versions about why the elements that the train needed to be successful were not built and why the route was never extended.
According to Pesquera, it was a political issue. He was the candidate for governor of Puerto Rico in 2000, but lost the election and argues that the incoming administration stopped the project.
The governor who won the elections, Sila María Calderón, has denied this accusation on several occasions, and says that not even for the first phase of the train, which was completed during her mandate, there was enough money and they had to give way to emissions of debt to finish the works.
An act of rebellion
Although there is no agreement on the reasons for the train’s lack of success, the truth is that Puerto Ricans were bequeathed an ambitious project that, despite its high cost, does not meet their day-to-day needs, as Brenda Mejía explains to BBC Mundo. , a travel editor and content creator.
It is a Friday around 5:00 pm and at the Domech station, in San Juan, there is a larger crowd of people using the train.
Even with its imperfections, it is vital transportation for some Puerto Ricans like Mejía.
“People tell me I’m crazy,” she says.
He is 34 years old and says that five years ago, after traveling through Europe and other places where the use of public transportation systems is common, he decided to abandon the car completely.
“I questioned how on such a small island I couldn’t do the same thing,” he says.
He adjusted his life to the Urban Train. She moved to a house as close as possible to a station and gets up very early every day to connect the bus route with the subway and thus get to the office on time.
However, he says that, in any case, “moving around by public transportation in Puerto Rico is a challenge, it is an act of resistance.”
“One of the big problems is that the train stations were not built as they should. They should be aligned with the buses, but sometimes the buses and the train are not combined at all,” he maintains.
Added to this is that due to the debt crisis facing the island, the government has not managed to maintain many elements of the train, nor modernize it.
“There are stations where it is very easy to be a ‘colado’, because the turnstiles are useless. And to buy tickets, you cannot use any type of card, only cash. If you put a lot of money into it, the same employees tell you that the machines are useless, that you can’t put very high figures because they won’t give you change and you’ll lose it,” he says.
For Mejía, there is little hope that the Tren Urbano will become an efficient system in the near future.
“Since there are no funds, it is not possible for things to improve. In addition, people are encouraged to have their own vehicle here. You look like a strange person when you try to get around on public transportation,” she says.
A proposal
Puerto Rico only emerged from a bankruptcy process last year due to a public debt that amounts to more than US$70 billion, of which the construction of the Urban Train represented 4%, says economist José Caraballo Cueto.
He also says that since said debt has not been audited, the real cost of the train will never be known, but he believes that, after new financing, it rises to about $3,000 million.
The professor at the University of Puerto Rico also comments that canceling the operations of the metro system would not be convenient, not only because the investment would be lost, but also because public transportation is necessary to generate economic growth in the territory.
“Without public transportation, it is difficult for more people to enter the labor market, especially in low-wage positions, where you cannot buy a vehicle,” he maintains.
This year, the Department of Transportation announced a new analysis that could result in the extension of the Urban Train. The proposal, however, has received criticism for the government’s intention to take it to a concert hall in Miramar, a neighborhood of San Juan.
But the current Secretary of Transportation, Eileen Vélez Vega, indicated that this initiative is just beginning and that it will take time to define if any changes to the metro line are possible.
Only the first phase of studies, which has public hearings, will take 15 months.
“We are evaluating the northwest of the metropolitan area for extension. In these areas there is a high density of population and industries, tourism and health services,” he indicates.
“And it does not mean that it will be a heavy train, like the one we have now. It can be light rail or high-frequency buses,” he adds.
Vélez Vega is betting that the changes in the metro system will be financed with the money allocated by the US government for the reconstruction of Puerto Rico after Hurricane María in 2017. This is about US$60 billion of which the island has managed to use very little, due to management and bureaucracy problems.
Given the lack of money, Caraballo Cueto believes that the most effective option would be to implement a rapid bus system.
But it is not the first time that there has been talk of improving the train. And, after almost two decades, nothing has come to fruition.
That is why Aiola Virella says that as a journalist it causes her “a lot of suspicion.” And she adds that, “as in athletics, with the train we have already seen many false starts.”
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