business & economy

Panama City's public transportation woes
by Eric Jackson

Do you hear President Torrijos making dire threats against the bus syndicates?

After the October 23, 2006 bus fire in which 18 people were incinerated, in addition to a short crackdown that made buses unbearably rare and overcrowded, Torrijos threatened to replace the city buses with a rapid transit system relying on large "articulated" buses. But the president had done none of his homework: nothing was in place to create the infrastructure needed for such a system.

Now, in the wake of another gruesome accident in which two buses racing to a bus stop collided and overturned, killing two and injuring dozens, Martín has issued a new threat. A plan to replace the "diablos rojos" --- generally reconditioned old US school buses --- with large 100-seat vehicles was leaked to El Panama America.

However, Torrijos only has a year and one-half left in office, this year's national budget has no money for the project, and the president hasn't been able to defeat the bus syndicates in the National Assembly to date. 

Would  a change of legal framework, the widening of key streets or alternatively a substantial change of bus routes, the process of awarding contracts or concessions, the purchase and delivery of the new buses and the operation of the new system be possible in the time Torrijos has left? Highly unlikely. Setting aside the legal and political issues for just a moment, we're approaching the point of physical impossibility.

But of course, we can't set aside the legal and political obstacles --- they are the heart of the problem. 

Why can't a PRD president get bus reform through a legislature dominated by his own party? One must go back to the October 11, 1968 coup d'etat in which the president's father, the late General Omar Torrijos, grabbed power, to understand. The political class whom the military overthrew had given away bus line franchises as political plums. Panama City had a private bus company with one such monopoly. As part of the dictatorship's "Revolutionary Process" such concessions were abolished, and, in a move to create a political base that antedated the establishment of the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), individual bus drivers were given loans to buy vehicles and permits (cupos) to operate on certain routes. Many cupos were issued on a political patronage basis. The drivers formed syndicates with the military's blessing. Thus a PRD president's challenge to bus syndicates is an attack on part of his or her own party's original base.

The capital in 2008, however, is not as it was in 1968. We are approaching total gridlock, with buses on crumbling and too-narrow streets a part of the problem. Due to high diesel prices (despite state subsidies for bus fuel) and the government's reluctance to raise fares, bus ownership isn't financially viable if all rules are followed. Thus we see corners being cut --- fines unpaid, maintenance not done, buses racing each other for an extra quarter at the next stop and so on.

There is a heterogeneous movement to reform the bus service, including, among others, the families of those killed and injured in the 2006 bus fire, the Panamanian Business Executives Association (APEDE) and the Catholic radicals of Panama Profundo. It not attracted a big following largely because the bus riders who are its natural constituency realize that someone would pay for any improvements.

Panama Profundo's Héctor Endara Hill expresses his "rotund and radical rejection of the mafia that controls public transportation and the authorities who run this mafia" and calls for the "municipalization" of bus service. But there is little public confidence that city hall would get it right. APEDE president Carlos Mastellari calls on the government to take buses and drivers that don't meet strict standards off the streets. But that was tried without success.

Forget the president's threat. But one of the candidates to succeed him, Panama City Mayor Juan Carlos Navarro, is calling for a metro area rail system --- as the Moscoso administration proposed and many urban planners and politicians of other parties also advocate. (Note, however, that the Moscoso plan was influenced by the taxi drivers' syndicates so as not to serve the Tocumen and Albrook airports.)

The problem won't be solved quickly, but it's getting worse so eventually it will be addressed. The most viable way to break the bus syndicates' power, through the creation of better means of getting a lot of people around town that will make buses less necessary, will take a few years.