Spotlight: Mexico City's cable car projects

After almost two years of construction work, Mexico City mayor Claudia Sheinbaum said line No. 1 of the cable car system Cablebús would start operations this Sunday, the first of two lines set to open this month. 

Representing an investment of 2.93bn pesos (US$146mn), the first Cablebús line (Indios Verdes-Cuatepec) will be 9.2km long with a 33 minute transit time from terminal to terminal along 62 towers and stations at Indios Verdes, Ticomán, La Pastora, Campos Revolución and the Cuautepec terminal. 

A branch line, running from Campos Revolución goes one stop to Tlalpexco station, as shown below. 

 

All three or possibly four Cablebús lines are designed to alleviate the snarling traffic typically seen for large numbers of working class people living in hard-to-reach parts of the city, mostly in neighborhoods that grew as poorly planned urban sprawl over the last 50 years on the slopes of the various hills that dot the capital.

Line No. 1 connects to line No. 3 of the metro system at Indios Verdes and lines No. 1 and 7 of the Metrobus BRT network.

Sheinbaum, in a press conference on Thursday, said the consortium that built the line – Consorcio Doppelmayr México – Gami Ingenieria e Instalaciones – would operate the line for the first year, followed by a year of transition to the city, which will take over all operations after two years.

Additional details in the BNamericas project database for all four lines, at various stages of development, are included below.

Line No. 2

Featuring capex of US$208mn with a consortium of Leitner AG and Pomagalski as the main contractor, line No. 2 will be the next to begin operation, with opening scheduled for July 24. 

The cable car line is 10.6km long with a 40-minute route time. There are seven stations: Constitución de 1917, Quetzalcóatl, Buenavista, Minas, Lomas de la Estancia, San Miguel Teotongo and Santa Marta. It will also connect with metro lines No. 8 and A, and the US$136mn elevated trolleybus line No. 8 project now under construction.

 

Sheinbaum recently said the elevated trolleybus line would open “in the coming months,” running from a shared station with line No. 8 of the metro at Constitución de 1917 to the Casa Libertad campus of the Mexico City autonomous university (UACM).

Lines No. 3 and 4

Although the first two lines are launching this month, line No. 3 remains in the pre-tender phase, and it is not clear whether line No. 4 will actually go ahead.

Sheinbaum said in February that construction of the third cable car line will start in 2022, and a tender would be launched either later this year or in the first few months of 2022. 

But few details about the project been revealed, although it is clear line No. 3 would be centered in Tlalpan, the largest of the capital’s 16 borough in southeastern Mexico City, which features hilly and even mountainous terrain.

The city government has expressed desire to use the line to connect the Ajusco neighborhood, the highest in Mexico City at 3,930m (1,680m higher than the city center) in Tlalpan to the Universidad metro station or nearby in the Coyoacán borough, lying within the city’s perimeter beltway.

Last year, Sheinbaum also said an analysis was underway to determine whether construction can be carried out in the area of the Picacho-Ajusco highway, which could benefit part of the population of Magdalena Contreras borough as well the east of Tlalpan, though there has been no recent update on this.

Lastly, with respect to line No. 4, which would target the city’s west side, Sheinbaum said in February that the city was weighing up whether to cancel the line entirely, given that the federal government, in collaboration with Mexico City and Mexico state, is on track to open the US$4.7bn, Mexico City-Toluca interurban rail link by early 2024, which would absorb passenger demand in the area.