Buenos Aires Querido IV

Buff how dramatic the previous post was, wasnt it? Maybe I should not write her if I am drinking, specially the day after a Sabina concert. Anyway, while I wait for the resolution of the III drama porteño, lets see if I can relax this a bit with a less complicated issue. Lets write one of these entries nobody comments (it seems that my personal issues sell much more than the supposedly useful information I intend to give in this blog). Lets talk about, for example… public transportation system in Buenos Aires. Wow! Fascinating isnt it? Well, I guess there will be someone who will find this info useful and that is the whole thing about it.
First one advice: get yourself a pocket “T” guide. You can get it everywhere. This small book has an index of all streets in Capital Federal including bus routes, a map of the subte and a map of the train. Basic for orientation in the huge Buenos Aires.

Subte

Buenos Aires has a subway system (they call it Subte, for “subterraneo”) a bit limited taking into account how huge the city is. There are currently five lines operating. D (green), B (red), A (light blue) and E (purple) go in different directions from microcentro to the end of capital federal, C (dark blue) goes pararel to Puerto Mader from North to South. You could say the infraestructure does its job but leaves a few areas uncovered. Actually the problem is that the subte is designed according to the very centralized way that Buenos Aires works. Most of the stuff happens in the microcentro, where the main commercial areas are, the public institutions and the big majority of the companies have their sites. If you have an office job you are very likely to be working in microcentro. Therefore, the main goal of the subte is to get all these people to work everyday and that is why more horizontal moves, from North to South, are less frequent and there are no subway lines for them.

You can imagine the result of this: first hour in the morning and around 6 pm, D, B, A and E lines become a nightmare. These wagons with no A/C absolutely crowded with people going or coming back from work… It is a very big deal to get into them and once you manage you wanna die in there. Honestly, this even becomes an important factor when it comes to choosing a job. I consider myself really luckly that I managed to avoid working in microcentro so far. Both Ekuar, my first job which was almost next door and IBM, whose site is outside the city, kept me away from the hardcode experience of using the subte in rush hour.

About the quality of the service, fair enough is the expression that applies. Is the Buenos Aires subway system as good as the one in european big cities such as Madrid, Paris or London? No, wagons are stations are more creepy, frequence is lower and delays and service interruptions are more often. However, is the Buenos Aires subway system a big an unsuable third world shit? Definitely not, it does its job perfectly and you have the feeling that it would not take too much effort to upgrade it to european standards, just by investing some money in its expansion and improvement.

One thing you realize when travelling by subte is how the effects of that big economic crisis Argentina suffered not so long ago are still present in the society. Almost everytime you use it you will have these people giving speeches in the wagons about how poor they are, how they lost their jobs and stuff like that and begging for money, or trying to sell you all sorts of stuff. Sadly as it is, most of the times they will be children leaving stamps on the pasengers and hoping to get some coins in exchange. Not that this does not happen in Europe but here is much more frequent and depressing…

A subte ticket is very cheap, 0.80 pesos (around 20 euro cents). It is adviceable to get this subway “monedero” card in which you can put money and use it to access the subte and also to pay for other stuff outside the subway system.

El colectivo

This is one of the key elements of Buenos Aires life.. the buses (called “colectivos” or “bondies” here). There are millions of them all over the city, almost 200 lines just in capital federal. They are the real owners of the roads, noisy, with very long routes covering the whole city and most of the time running really fast. There is no place you need to go you can not get there by linking two or more colectivos.

Been a colectivo driver (colectivero) has to be a very stressing job. It is not only about dealing with the terrible traffic of the city but they also need to pay attention to the travellers paying for their rides. I will talk more about this later but the thing is that when you board a bus here you need to tell the driver the price you are going to pay, he presses the right buttom and you put coins in the machine. Deppending on your destination you will pay a different ammount. Sometimes it will be 1.10, or 1.20 or 1.25 and so on. Actuallly there is a bit of trustness in the passenger here because you can tell not the destination but the ammount you will pay and very few times the driver will do more than pushing the bottom. This means that, if you are cheap enough, you can always pay 1.10 even if you are gonna stay in the bus for a very long ride.

So talking about the way bus trips are paid it is a very good moment to introduce a very relevant topic concerning life in Buenos Aires: coins! This city has to be one of the few places in the world were having change becomes critical. Because, appart from very few exceptions, colectivos only accept coins which means if you run out of them you might be really fucked up. And it is not easy at all to get them. Apparently the production of coins is not enough to cover the demand and everybody are always in need of them. All shops will avoid at all cost to give change back and will always ask for you to pay in a way they dont loose coins. Dont fall into that! Lie! Say you dont have coins or you may loose your only way to get home. You have to always keep a provision of coins. Buenos Aires is the only city in which you can walk around with quite a lot of money on your pocket but not have enough for getting home. Because maybe the subte is closed already (after 10) and maybe you live far away and a taxi is too expensive. So it might happen you end up buying shit you dont need just to get the coins you need for the bus. A trick which very often does not work because, as I said, shops dont give change away so easily. In fact, you will notice most of them have a big notice saying “NO COINS!”.

Going back to the colectiveros stress topic, I recently was told that they need to drive the route in a certain fixed time and they keep checking they dont get late. If that happens they loose money. It does not seem like a very fair thing to do, specially in a job with so many factors out of their control (traffic jams, accidents etc..). What this causes in the end is that these guys sometimes drive fucking crazy or, even worse, sometimes they wont stop where you have been waiting for a while cause they are on a race against the timetable.

From the outside, the relation colectivero - colectivo seems quite intense. Most of these buses are sort of personalized by the driver which put religious stuff, things their children did for them or, in general, any sort of stuff they like. It seems that a driver always drive the same bus so he makes himself at home. In some cases this will include purple interior lights, decorative stuff in the outside of the vehicle or coloured wheels, just for giving some examples.

Here every bus is different. Each line uses a different design and colours and then, as I mentioned before, each driver will customize their “work tool” to the point that there is even a technical word for that action: “el fileteado”, defined by Martiniano Arce, supposedly one of the main “fileteadores” as “art on wheels, making the city happy with colorful designs, sayings and legends, with humoristic, reflexive or philosophical meanings”. Wikipedia tells me this art had his best moment before 1975 when a law which forbidded this kind of stuff was set. However, in 2006 the “fileteado” was declarad cultural heritage of the city of Buenos Aires and nowadays is not strange to see colectives full of small flags, inscriptions and all sorts of stuff which will make your journey a bit less boring.

Well, I guess that was enough for this topic. Let me tell you that the drivers might be very stressed but most of the times they will be very helpful and, besides, they work during the night. It is difficult to think of Buenos Aires without all these bondies passing all the time (sometimes you can see buses from the first line driving one after the other). There are modern and old ones. With or without A/C. More sophisticated or really crappy ones. I never took so many buses in my life as I have taken this year in Argentina, as a consequence of having been downgraded to the pedestrian status after ten years using my car for everything. Well, it was not that terrible

Trains

This is a transportation mean not too developed in the country but quite important in the capital, where a few short distance lines can take you to “provincia” much faster than the Subte. I havent got too much to say about them, the only one I used more or less regularly was the “Mitre” one, to Tigre, in the North and known to be the safest and more efficient one. I head some lines in the South are not so adviceable but I have no experience about it. In any case, it is quite a good thing to live close to a train station which allow you to get to Retiro (main station, very close to the center) in just a few stops instead of spending ages on the subte. Trains are obviouslly not as frequent as subway but if you know the time table they normally are on time and I was never in one which broke down. Here you have a map of trains in Buenos Aires.

No es nada habitual utilizar el tren para largos recorridos, si acaso para irte desde Buenos Aires a Rosario, que está a tres horas. En general la red ferroviaria en Argentina está bastante abandonada y se utiliza más que nada para transporte de mercancías. La gente aquí se mueve más en bus en las largas distancias(ver siguiente apartado).It is not usual at all to use train for long distances, maybe just from Buenos Aires to Rosario, three hours away. In general the train network is not developed at all and they use it more for goods. People usually travel by bus (see next chapter).

Micros

That is the word the use for long distance buses here. By the way, Retiro is also the main bus station. By using these buses you can get almost everywhere in the country or even move to adjacent countries such as Brazil, Paraguay or Chile, as long as you are pacient enough to spend a couple of days on the road. It is written somewhere else in this blog but keep in mind buses here are really nice so this long rides are not so terrible in the end. Furthermore, if you are willing to spend some extra money you can travel really comfortable.

The cheapest ticket you can get is called “semi-cama”, that means a bus which seats bend over 45 degrees. Thats something in Europe we would already consider to be good. Next level is the once called “cama” (bed) which gets almost horizontal and, finally, the highest one is the “ejecutivo” which basically becomes a proper bed. If you go further and get the “suite” one you will get a bunch of extras which basically deppend on the company you are travelling with. In general most of them have people serving meals and drinks, cofee, water and things like that.

Have a look at the next table with distances from Buenos Aires to some important cities on the country and you will notice how huge Argentina is. For example the distance from Puerto Iguazu, in the very North, to Ushuaia, the most southern city, is aproximately a bit more than 4000 km. That is more or less what we have in Europe between Madrid and North of Sweden, just for you to get an idea…

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Tags: Buenos Aires