Mexico - A Partial Retrospective

It's been an interesting past month and a half. While work on Mexican cities is still not done, I still think it's worth giving a partial retrospective - after all, things are pretty different from how they were in the USA and Canada.

Unlike the USA and Canada, the main language in Mexico is Spanish. In addition, official government or agency websites are harder to find. Researching cities was therefore quite different from before.

The first thing I did as I geared up for Mexico was prepare a document detailing every single system I was going to cover. Normally, this wouldn't be a concern, but Mexico is big, and there are gaping holes in every dataset. BRTData.org has been an occasional link in the description for pages in the USA and Canada, but now it was a primary resource. Without it, I would never have realized that there were actually two BRT corridors in Monterrey (though this is actually a point of shame, which I will get to later).

Notably, BRTData.org sometimes lists corridor scores as 'Not BRT' and misses data entirely for other cities. This caused a great deal of consternation - the ITDP's BRT Ranking spreadsheet, as of January 2021 at least, does NOT always match up with the data on BRTData.org, and some corridors just do not appear on it. This was most egregious with Acapulco - at the time of writing this blog post, it is one of two cities besides Mexico City itself that I have not covered yet where I know they have some form of BRT infrastructure in operation. It seems to have a dedicated ROW (albeit without enforcement)... except when it doesn't - IE the tunnel, which has no Google Street View (something I'll be bringing up again). there is also the part where the data on BRTData.org is clearly out of date (most obvious with León).

But back to the document. Rail systems in Mexico are easy to list. There aren't many. However, when it comes to BRT, it can be hard to figure out which cities actually have it. The real issue is that as Fort Collins (and recently, Lund) have proven, the minimum population in a city needed to run a BRT line or tramway is... low. In Mexico, I found this out via Pachuca - a small city with a BRT line. By default, this meant that at the end of December, I undertook a massive task - listing out every single city in Mexico with a population greater than Pachuca and doing research into whether or not it had a BRT network.

This was worth it. But at the same time, it brought up a pile of issues. Firstly, I was working almost entirely with secondary sources. Blog posts and BNamericas (which I did not and still do not have a subcription for) constituted most of the raw information, and I was entirely dependent on Google Street View and Google Maps Satellite View for verification - both of which are typically months if not years out of date.

As I made my way through the list, I found a number of BRT systems I had no idea existed, because they didn't show up on BRTData.org, the ITDP website, or Wikipedia. The two I discovered were Querétaro and Mexicali (if you can call the latter BRT). Querétaro is especially interesting because it turned out to have the easiest research after the fact due to a PDF document on the official website explaining... pretty much everything. I actually found out about it having BRT because I used Google Satellite View to determine whether or not busways and BRT stations were present, and yep - smack in the middle of the city. As for Mexicali... I haven't made a page for it yet. It's Basic BRT at best and I've skipped busways with higher standards (the busway runs through the part where it was easiest to build, not the part where it was actually useful). Almost all of my research on Mexicali came from Google Street View/Satellite View and media articles screaming 'fracaso'.

In the same research phase, I went one by one through every single city that wasn't part of a larger metro area. San Luis Potosí was added to my 'maybe take a look at this' list, Aguascalientes took some work to determine that it wasn't BRT standard, and Torreón... well, maybe it'll open. Eventually. The infrastructure has pretty much been built, at least on the Coahuila side.

Finally, Tijuana deserves a special mention. Thanks to Yonah Freemark's The Transport Politic, which was of immense help in the USA and Canada (much less so in Mexico), I already knew it had something. However, the data on his site was incomplete, the official SITT website is useless because it manages to be entirely devoid of useful information on routing of services, and all I could find on Google Maps was a clear lack of dedicated Right of Way. And so sorry, Tijuana does not get a page on this website until the SITT gets their act together or political will does it for them.

And now, as promised, the Truly Special Mention - Transmetro Guadalupe. Monterrey was the very first city I did in the Mexico wave (Juárez was done together with El Paso), and the fact that I missed Transmetro Guadalupe despite it being mentioned in my notes and it being on the BRTData.org website is an embarrassment. Especially because it took three whole weeks for me to realize.

Speaking of the Monterrey area, every single city, without exception, had some kind of nasty quirk that caught me off guard when I began making pages. In Monterrey's case, there were two (besides the aforementioned Transmetro Guadalupe). The first is Regina. Due to the Monterrey Metro's official website being an incomprehensible government website with absolutely no information on the actual Metrorrey network, I got quite literally everything from the Ecovía website, which did a comparatively phenomenal job. Icons, station names, and... uh... an off-busway station that provides a transfer to the metro, but which is only served by feeder services?

To be fair, Pachuca does the same, but I was already aware of that (well, not the full extent - see the Pachuca section of this blog post), but this drove me a little crazy.

The second nasty issue was that, as I note in the Archive, every single source (Wikipedia.es, OpenStreetMaps, Urbanrail.net, and the Transport Politic) had a different set of station names for the under construction Line 3. In the end, I went on Google Street View and used the signage that had been installed on the stations... at least for the elevated ones. I have no idea if the Barrio Antiguo station even exists, if it exists under a different name, or if it's the Line 3 name for the transfer with Line 2 (and why are they not doing through-service here anyways? Or are they? I honestly don't know).

I simply do not understand how you can produce a beautiful color map for your system and then provide grayscaled versions on your system's website. This was infuriating and I hope they change this practice. I had to take colors from an unofficial map on Wikipedia because of this. Also, I couldn't find the other platform for Camacho Espíritu on Google Street View, so I have no idea if it's a one-way station. The maps also imply that it's served by the Line 3 branch that's literally on a bridge at that location, but I have no idea. Unfortunately, there's a good chance that I've published an error on my website, but hopefully, if it is an error, it will be discovered and fixed... eventually.

León was one of those cities where I was entirely oblivious to the scale of the network simply because BRTData.org only showed Phase 1. Of four completed phases.

León, of every single city I've done in Mexico, gave me the most fun when making the map. In fact, it was the... only city that was fun. Multiple services, a cleanish city structure, and some determination resulted in a pretty balanced map. But that aside, the network blends full BRT with... not full BRT. Phase 1 was mostly proper BRT, but there are also dedicated lanes in a single direction only, center stations with no dedicated right of way, and complete mixed traffic operations, as well as one directional service and an official system map that dropped the single directional stations on Line 2 in the city center while still showing them on the line maps. Are they still open? I have no idea.

On the plus side, León has a fantastic network scale-wise, and their website was actually moderately useful at everything except for getting me a system map (which I had to delegate to the official Twitter).

Guadalajara was interesting in that I got into a heated discussion on the RMTransit Discord as to whether or not Line 3 is considered Light Metro or full Metro. The end result was a spreadsheet that pointed out that HART in Hawaii, due to having to use wider car bodies, is almost certainly higher capacity (per train) than most full metros. That aside, the research wasn't actually that bad here, except that the color for the Mi Macro Periférico seemed to change depending on which official website you were on. Well, every line's colors were different depending on which official website you were on, but... that's a separate issue.

tl;dr Please do not open an off-busway station with the same name as a pre-existing busway station but in a different location, and then rename the old busway station. I get why they did it, but it made research a complete wreck. Google Street View (at least at the time) was contradicting itself because the footage of the new station and the busway was taken at different times, the system map was out of date, and the Wikipedia map suggested that stopping services went onto the spur, then continued northbound onto the busway. The official website did clarify the stopping patterns though.

Also, Pachuca is another case of 'let's not serve the massive new terminal with a trunk service' but that's a separate issue. Monterrey already prepared me mentally.

Aside from making the initial Ciudad Juárez research painful due to naming issues with the brand they used for their BRT, Chihuahua actually wasn't too bad research-wise. No ugly surprises as long as you realize that the eastern part of the route has one way operation. This is not shown on the official route map despite the single directional operation in the city center being shown. Thankfully BRTData.org and the clearly-one-directional station at Deportiva Sur helped identify this.

Halfway through Mexico, two new features got added to the Metro Route Atlas. These were formalized standards for languages besides English, and an external references system. The former came as a result of seeing official city names everywhere, and the latter came as a result of Querétaro.

First, the former. It felt wrong to leave out the official names of Spanish language cities, and I had inconsistencies with the way I was handling line names. So I came to a solution where I would include official names for Spanish language cities, and set up standards for how to handle line names, based off of what I had done in Montréal (though admittedly, Montréal was the only case I had worked with beforehand).

And then the second. Querétaro's BRT has no page on Wikipedia. There is nowhere I can reference for data besides the website's PDF. And so I went and implemented a reference system to store links to primary and secondary sources not named Wikipedia or the operator's website. It's only used there for now, but in the future, its usage will be expanded.

In summary, Mexico has been a roller coaster of a month and a half so far, and quite a lot of research went into it. I developed standards for how to handle quite a lot of different cases, and I now have a clear way to perform research on other countries with partial data. Though that being said, the next Mexico scale country is Brazil, which is an entire project on its own.

Three more cities in Mexico left, unless I decide to drop Acapulco and/or Mexicali (this is still to be determined at this point). And yes, Mexico City's rapid transit network is complicated. It will take time.