As of last year, the average cab ride in Buenos Aires cost between three and five dollars. So why bother with public transit, then? Many foreigners don’t. But each of us must decide how much we value ease over money, and for a cheapskate like me, it’s hard to justify passing up a 30-cent bus ride.
These city buses, or colectivos, are not only cheap, they’re also considered something of a moving national monument. Argentines put them in the same mental category as the Obelisco, the Avenida 9 de Julio (THE WIDEST AVENUE IN THE WORLD), tango, and their “passion” for football.
Colectivos are less a form of public transportation than, as the name implies, collective transportation. In the 1920s, there were a variety of travel options for the porteño: city buses, trams, taxis, the metro. Soon some five-seat Chevrolet “taxi-buses” appeared, parking near the busiest bus and tram stops, picking up and dropping off passengers by request along a designated route (often the same one the buses and trams ran along). Soon enough, city buses died out under the competition from the colectivos, despite the latter’s slightly steeper fare, and the routes they ran were formalized as numbered lineas.
In the 90s the various trucks used as colectivos were replaced by normal-looking, rear engined bus-sized buses manufactured by Mercedes-Benz. But, although the colectivos get subsidized gas from the government, which also sets the price of a ride, they are still essentially private enterprises, with different companies running no more than a few lines. For example, Lineas 60 and 32 are run by MONSA, Microómnibus Norte Sociedad Anónima (Anonymous North Microbus Society?). This results in significant variation in levels of comfort and quality of service among the lineas, as well as the full range of black-smoke-belching capabilities.
(Interestingly enough, you can see a phenomenon similar to Argentina’s 1920′s-era public transit situation in Eastern Europe today. Marshrutkas (“fixed-route taxis”) began sprouting up around bus stops in Russia in the 90s, due to the proliferation of the GAZelle, a relatively cheap and reliable 12-seat minibus, enabling enterprising victims of the Soviet collapse to make a living as a driver. Speedier and more comfortable than other ground transport, marshrutkas are a blessing in congested Moscow and sometimes practically the only transit option in smaller provincial cites like Ryazan and Irkutsk. It would not be terribly surprising, although somewhat ironic, if in ten years Russia, like Argentina, had a wholly privately owned ground transport system.)
This is all kind of interesting (maybe), but not so much as to make a city bus a national point of pride. That can be explained by this:
1960's era bondi with fileteado.
Which is what the colectivo looked like before the 1970s. The psychedelic art nouveau painting is fileteado, the porteño folk art form. Its specific origins are unclear, but it started showing up in the early 20th century on horse carriages, then on the trucks of working class immigrant men, putting it in the venerable tradition of racing stripes, fins, rims and other ways guys show off their cars. The symbols of fileteado imitate luxury (the spirals are reminiscent of the decorative reliefs of Italian and Spanish architecture), convey pride of place or origin (the Spanish flag, the Argentine flag, or the more diplomatic Spanish-flag-merged-with-Argentine-flag), or are intended to offer protection (dragons, La Virgin). Flowers and birds are also popular themes, although nobody can really explain why.
Then in the 1970s, fileteado and other decoration on buses was outlawed, with the justification that it was “distracting.” I’ve heard two interpretations of this: that a) the fileteado was distracting to other drivers or that b), as venerable fileteado master Leon Untroib explained:
“There was a custom to decorate the colectivos with ornamentations, especially around the big mirror [in the interior of old colectivos above the windshield], but later the ornamentations were eliminated because, as they said, the driver got distracted. And really, it was too much decoration, and some of the colectivos looked like circus cars.”
Both of these reasons seem ridiculous in today’s Argentina, given that a) buses are regularly plastered with advertisements for things like “Por Amor a Vos!” and High School Musical, and the streets have been colonized by billboards and neon, and b) colectivo drivers, in my experience, regularly do rather distracting things, like talk on cell phones or read the newspaper while driving. But, aside from the occasional inconspicuous flag or curlicue, fileteado on buses is probably not coming back any time soon.
Next time: How to ride a colectivo.
Question of the day: What, if anything, would you want painted on your car?
