A road map for Santiago's bus system

Since its debut a decade ago, Chile's Transantiago bus system has been heavily criticized for being inefficient, over-congested and expensive, in addition to suffering high fare evasion rates.

While solutions are still being discussed both inside and outside the government, a new tender has been launched to renew 50% of the network's routes for 10 years, starting in 2018.

UK firm Tower Transit Group, one of the companies that has decided to participate in the tender, operates 1,000 buses in the UK and Singapore and serves over 20mn passengers per year in London alone.

BNamericas spoke with the chairman of Tower Transit, Neil Smith, on what attracted the company to Chile and how the firm's ideas are shaping up to improve mobility in Santiago.

BNamericas: What is your motivation for participating in this tender for Transantiago?

Smith: We're an international company with businesses in London and Singapore, and we have an associated company in Australia, so we're always looking for opportunities to expand the business.

Santiago is particularly attractive for two or three reasons. Chile is an organized country, where we have confidence in the rule of law and in the government and the financial system. There are many, many countries with interesting bus systems where that confidence doesn't exist.

We see this as a low-risk country to come to. It's in the OECD and part of the Asia-Pacific Forum. I was here [in Chile] in 2007 when Transantiago was first introduced. It wasn't a happy thing to watch.

We think that the government is a trustworthy partner to work with, but I think the bigger picture is that we're not only focused on making money for shareholders, we actually like to do interesting projects, so we think Santiago is a very exciting place. The city is almost where it should be as a first world developed city and there's a few gaps in the picture, and one of those gaps is the bus system.

We feel like if we come here, we can make a huge contribution. We can do something that people can look back on after five years and say "that was a problem and these guys came and contributed to fixing it." So it's partly a business decision based on all the commercial benefits, but it's also partly because this is an exciting project for us.

I think that the government has a clear vision on what they want to achieve, but it needs stronger private sector partners to deliver its agenda. And we're very comfortable with where the government wants to go, so we see an opportunity to form a very positive constructive partnership with the government.

BNamericas: Are you concerned about the upcoming presidential election, given that the frontrunner [Sebastián Piñera] is currently in opposition to the government?

Smith: No. I think that actually Chile is interesting. There seems to be a level of continuity across elections, which is stronger than in many other countries. You have a center-left party and a center-right party, and the world doesn't turn inside out when you change from one to the other. We're not concerned with which way that election goes.

BNamericas: Do you have any specific ideas on how to improve Santiago's transportation system?

Smith: There are a few areas. We believe a lot of work has to be done on relationships with the drivers and I think we have to deliver a different relationship from the one that currently exists. That may involve benefits for the drivers in terms of their working conditions, but it also may involve raising expectations for the drivers in terms of things like collecting fares or their driving skills.

We've done this in Singapore. We've been able to build quite a different relationship with the workforce from what was there before; the job is much more respected. That's a key aspect of the agenda. A second one is there are problems with the maintenance and cleaning of the buses, and we have well-developed systems that we use in London, that we use to focus on that.

The problem here is very unusual. It's very much about just applying basic business skills to do the job properly. Cleaning up buses isn't rocket science. We used four buses here and none of them were at the standard we'd run a bus with. They were part of a newer batch of buses and they had problems that a 10-year old bus shouldn't have. It's not difficult to maintain buses, and there's nothing special about Santiago that says you can't have clean, well-maintained buses, so that's another area.

I think we've operated buses in more difficult areas than Santiago in terms of traffic. London in particular is much more difficult than this, and we're able to run those buses at regular frequencies. So I think if we apply what we do in Singapore and what we do in London, we believe we can significantly improve the regularity of the service. Again, there's no special problem in Santiago that dictates that the buses are irregular. There are some areas with difficult traffic but, to be honest, there are other parts of the world with far worse traffic. So there's no reason why the standards in Santiago can't be equal to or higher than the standards used in London and Singapore.

There's also an air quality problem in the city, and we operate hydrogen buses, hybrid buses, electric buses, etc. We have a lot of experience across that whole spectrum. We're very supportive of the agenda the government has to experiment with electric buses. Our standard is the Euro 6 technology, which is very rare in Latin America, and that has a dramatic effect on emissions.

BNamericas: One thing that's always discussed when talking about Santiago's urban transportation is infrastructure. Do you think that more could be done on this front to improve the transport system in the city?

Smith: I think that we're very fortunate that this city was originally designed by Spaniards, because Spaniards built wide roads. I think there's an issue on how you allocate road space; there will always be a shortage of road space in a city. And I think that there's still a debate within the Chilean government on how you allocate road space.

If a bus is used by 100 people, it's entitled to the same road space used by 100 cars used by one person each. There should be a principle like that in every government agency, which dictates that road space is allocated equitably between public transport, private transport, bicycles and pedestrians.

Yes, there should be more bus infrastructure. Buses can work very well if they have good infrastructure, and here there is some good infrastructure, but it's not particularly well joined up. A small investment in bus infrastructure can deliver a very big benefit to users.

If you compare the costs of building bus infrastructure to building a metro, the cost of building 2km of metro lines could transform the bus system. We've talked about it a lot with the government here. It comes down to money and priorities. If people want a much better bus system, infrastructure is a key part of achieving it.

BNamericas: How do you think that the integration between the metro and bus systems in Santiago could be improved?

Smith: The level of integration has to improve, but the other thing about Santiago, which is unusual, is that the subway lines are at their top capacity. For me it was hard to breathe. The bus shouldn't compete with the subway, but rather supplement it in areas where it's overcrowded, and we believe buses can do that, but I don't think that Transantiago has been designed for that.

There seems to be a bus design and a subway design, and I think that there's a lot of room to solve that issue. And if we're successful, since we have a lot of expertise in that area and this is something we'd like to work on with the government, we'd be able to show that there are better ways to do this.

But you also have something very unusual in Chile and Latin America, which is that people don't like transferring. In London, for example, on a normal journey you transfer two or three times, people are used to it. But all over Latin America there's this huge resistance, people prefer to sit on one bus for two hours rather than change twice and get to their destination in an hour.

But I think that there's room to improve. You have a world class subway system and it's getting better all the time, and the role of the buses is to complement it, not to compete with it.