Mexico City is a model of mega-urbanism

Since the end of the coronavirus pandemic, tourism seems to have increased almost everywhere I go. The small alpine village where my parents live is packed with crowds, museums in London and Paris that used to be a breeze now require timed-entry tickets, and already-busy Bali feels like it's bursting at the seams.

In a hectic world, I've found that some less famous cities like Taipei and Warsaw are great places to experience good urbanism without the Instagram-fueled crowds. Recently, I was fortunate enough to visit Mexico City, which is the latest example I've seen of a middle-income city making major strides in urbanism and transportation.

Mexico City is massive. By most measures, it's the fifth or sixth largest city in the world, with 22 million people. It grew immensely during the 20th Century, from 500,000 people in 1900 to 18 million by 2000 and as a result, faces challenges common to many mega cities. Air pollution is bad, flooding is a problem, and huge natural spaces have been engulfed by sprawl. But it also does a lot of things well!

Good Transit

Mexico City's public transport system is impressive. It's comprised of a 12 line metro system, seven BRT lines running in dedicated lanes, more buses and colectivos than I could count, and three aerial cableways. There's an integrated ticket and a iconographic wayfinding system famously designed for illiterate people as part of the 1968 Olympics. I also saw lot of new Chinese electric buses from BYD and Yutong, which is really exciting given that these are effectively banned in many western countries.

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A Vibrant Urban Fabric

Mexico City's urban fabric is also interesting. The city is pretty dense, with about 8,000 people per square kilometre, but I found that most neighbourhoods were airy, green, peaceful away from the big, busy streets - reminiscent of the interiors of Barcelona's much-hyped superblocks. There are pedestrian streets, formal and informal markets, and multi-functional parks all over. Mexico City is particularly good at creating linear parks in road medians, which I think other cities could look to as a means to make new bike infrastructure more popular with the general public, and harder to remove.

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Perhaps the biggest surprise for me was the city's bicycle infrastructure, and even moreso its bicycle culture. It's not Amsterdam, but for a city of such size and traffic volumes, I was impressed to see people cycling in protected bike lanes everyhwere I went. The growth in bike infrastructure seems be a relatively recent policy effort and appears to be paying off, at least based on the bikeshare data I can find. The city's Ecobici bike share system averages about 1.8 million rides per month, or about 2,600 rides per dock. That's more than double the ridership of just five years ago though in comparison to other successful bikeshare systems, below, there is still a ways to go.

	2024 Annual ridership	Docks	Bikes	Per Dock Ridership	Per Bike Ridership
Mexico City	3,750,000	700	9,300	5,357	403
Paris	49,000,000	1,500	20,000	32,667	2,450
London	8,700,000	800	12,000	10,875	725
NYC	44,200,000	1,500	25,000	29,467	1,768
Montreal	13,000,000	900	12,600	14,444	1,032

Data Sources: ecobici, vélib, TFL, Citibike, Bixi

One of the most uplifting things I experienced while in the city was the Muevéte En Bici, a large-scale street closure on Sundays for recreational cycling, running, and walking. I've seen this in a few other cities - Bogota is famous for it and New York does something similar once a year - but with 55 kilometres of streets closed every Sunday, Mexico City's is the biggest recurring street closure I'm aware of.

Image: City of Mexico

More Public Transport Is Needed

Most of the urban issues I saw in Mexico City come down to scarcity, rather than poor implementation. There are essentially no rubbish bins or public bathrooms to speak of, which seems to contribute to some degree of litter. Perhaps more importantly for most locals, the city clearly needs two or three times more public transport than it has. The existing rapid transit system doesn't cover enough of the urban area, and is already incredibly busy. The city's 12 metro lines carry 4.5 million passengers per day, similar to the London Underground but in a city twice the size. That's a lot of untapped demand.

Unfortunately, Mexico City doesn't seem to have much in the way of transit expansion plans. As far as I can discern, there are only three rapid transit construction projects underway: a short metro extension, a new regional rail line to Toluca, and an upgrade of the rail line to serve the new NLU airport. These are good, and the new line to Toluca promises to set a particularly good precedent for rapid commuter rail, but there does not appear to be any grand vision for expansion of the metro network within Mexico City at all. I don't know enough to say why this is, but it stands out as perhaps the biggest area for improvement in an overall inspiring city.