Bogota Metro to receive bids

Bidding to build a subway system in Bogota will open in the second half of 2015, mayor Gustavo Petro said last week.

Successive governments in the city of 8 million have talked about a metro for seven decades.

Now the city has plans to have operational by 2020 a first line, including 27 stations over 32 km – equivalent to 20 miles - running through the center of the city from the Portal de las Americas in the Kennedy district in southwest Bogota, and then to Calle 127 in the northeast.

The subway, which will be electric and run entirely underground, is expected to cost $7 billion, with the federal government putting up 70% of the cost, with the city financing the rest.

Currently, there are more than 3 million car trips daily in Bogota, where traffic for years has been notoriously congested.

The international engineering firm Siemens would be interested in bidding on various aspects of a Bogota metro, including underground 4G wireless service, Daniel Fernandez, the company’s vice president for Latin America, said last July.

The company previously won a bid to install Colombia’s biggest intelligent traffic-control system, and was part of a consortium, which in the 1980s built the Medellin Metro.