Caracas underground offers free rides amid worsening conditions

Venezuela’s economic crisis is strangling Caracas’ public transport system. Hundreds of buses have been withdrawn from circulation, increasing the pressure on the underground, which no longer receives income from ticket sales because it costs too much to print them.Fare tickets are no longer for sale in the Caracas underground, anyone can enter, free of charge, through the turnstiles into what once was one of Latin America’s most advanced underground railway systems. There is hardly any staff at the ticket offices, which may display a ‘Closed’ sign. Yet despite the silence at the entrance, trains are still rumbling underneath, with thousands of people crammed into the red wagons.The underground of the Venezuelan capital has run out of tickets because there are no funds to import the material they were made of. The lack of income from ticket sales has contributed to an increasing deterioration of the underground, with constant delays, technical failures, poor maintenance, lack of air conditioning and insecurity.Those problems reflect a general crisis in Venezuela’s public transport system, says lawmaker Nora Bracho, Head of the Commission of Administration and Services in the opposition-dominated National Assembly.The oil-producing South American country is mired in a deep economic crisis that has taken hundreds of privately run buses, lacking for spare parts, tyres, oil or batteries - out of service in Caracas and thousands nationwide.The lack of buses has increased pressure on the underground in the capital of Venezuela, where inflation is expected to reach a million per cent this year, according to the International Monetary Fund. The underground carries more than 2 million people daily on its five lines. Studies done in the 1970s,  before the underground was enlarged, put the maximum number of passengers at 700,000.The underground service includes funicular railways travelling to low-income neighbourhoods on hilltops and a fleet of buses covering areas that are located far away from underground stations. It’s on such a bus that President Nicolas Maduro worked as a driver before his political career took off.“The underground functions badly,” said Bracho, who has presented a report on the problems. “The trains do not function correctly, escalators have broken down, there is no maintenance. Some wagons travel with their doors open,” she said in a statement.The problems also include a lack of cleaning, employees leaving to look for better jobs, thefts and robberies, Bracho said. “Good service is not demanded because fares are not collected. This is unsustainable. There are hawkers in the wagons, and criminal robberies are on the increase,” the lawmaker explained.In the first few years after the underground was inaugurated in 1983, a ticket cost almost twice as much as a bus ticket, but the price then got stuck at four bolivars. Now the underground has no ticket income at all, while a bus ticket costs 10,000 bolivars. One dollar is worth about 3.5 million bolivars on the black market. The state company Compania Anonima Metro de Caracas operates the underground service, which requires the circulation of at least 38 trains at a time, at the cost of tens of millions of dollars yearly.“They should collect fares, but covering the cost of printing tickets would make the prices soar, because the material is purchased in dollars,” said an employee who did not want to be named.The lack of public transport has increased the use of trucks, known as ‘dog pounds,’ to carry people. Nearly 40 people were killed and 275 injured in accidents involving such vehicles in Venezuela in the first six months of 2018, according to the parliamentary commission.French-made trains carried the first underground passengers in January 1983 after a decade of studies on how to improve public transport. Line 1, which transports the most passengers, links the west of the capital with the east over a distance of 20 kilometres.More than 5 billion dollars were invested in adding four more between 1987 and 2010. The Brazilian construction company Odebrecht did not complete a planned expansion amid corruption scandals engulfing it in other countries of the region.In 2010, the government approved an investment of 30 million dollars to improve train service, traction and freight systems, electricity supply, air conditioning and escalators.–DPA