Lessons from Medellín
Lessons from Medellin
Posted: December 23, 2015
Barbara Miner
[font size=1]
Bird sculptures by Fernando Botero, reminders of a history of violence. Photo couresty of Barbara Miner
[/font]
In early September, days before my husband and I were to leave for Medellín, Colombia, for three months, we watched the Netflix series Narcos. In graphic detail, the series shows how drug king Pablo Escobar unleashed an era of death and destruction that made Medellín the murder capital of the world.
Bob and I turned to each other, wondering, “Are we nuts?”
A few weeks later, we travel to Comuna 13, once considered Medellín’s poorest and most dangerous neighborhood. We use Medellín’s bike-share system (which is free) to get to the metro. We pay about seventy cents to take the metro to Comuna 13, then another forty cents to take a bus to a free escalator system that zigzags up the neighborhood’s steep hills, climbing the equivalent of a twenty-five-story building. Later, we ride up a 1.7-mile gondola system in another hillside section of Comuna 13, which has cut travel time for workers from more than an hour to less than ten minutes. An integral part of the city’s mass transit system, the gondolas can transport more than 3,000 people per hour.
Medellín was the first city in the world to use gondolas for public transit, and also the first to use escalators in a residential neighborhood. Its mass transit also includes a metro, dedicated bus lanes, and, beginning recently, light rail.
In Wisconsin, where Bob and I are from, one of Governor Scott Walker’s first acts was to reject the federal government’s $810 million subsidy for high-speed rail. It’s impossible not to ask why this city in a supposedly “developing” country is so far ahead of some places in the United States, including my own city of Milwaukee.
More:
http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/12/188473/lessons-medell%C3%ADn