Transit of Chile

Public Transit in Chile

Maicolpue is a Pacific beach fewer forty miles from the regional transportation center of Osorno.  However, it takes nearly an hour and a half to drive from Osorno to the family friend’s vacation cabin hunkered on the low hills overlooking a crescent of sand.  Osorno sits  on a plain amongst lakes, rivers and just west of the volcanoes in southern Chile.  At Maicolpue, the low coast range  blocks the otherwise dominating view of Mt. Osorno, one of many snow-capped volcanic cones in this section of the Andes.   You can get a bus to Maiculpe and beyond.

It was May, November-equivalent for northern hemisphere, few of these middle-class summer cabins were in use this season.  Two yellow boats with anchors,  empty gas cans, compressors and long unruly coils of plastic tubing had been deserted far up onto the beach.   Worked so hard by the divers - likely poachers of locos, abalone-like mollusks, the wood seemed determined to return to nature - it had acquired a hand-hewn appearance.   

In the hour we’d wandered with shoulders hunched along the beach before lunch, perhaps three pick ups and a couple of cars had driven one way or another along the road that we had taken south from Bahia Manse, our first sighting of the south Pacific.  A few penguins wander comfortably in these surroundings.

A bus pulls up, stops to drop six passengers in Maicolpue and chugs along to the south.  The roads ends three miles further down the coast.  Twenty minutes each way.  The bus, medium in capacity and not battle-scarred like the boats, surprised here at the thin edge of the long, long Chilean periphery.  But two weeks in the country revealed that transit of the public was a varied success with new challenges.  

In the Capitol, Santiago, 600 miles to the north, there were then five modern subway lines.  Now there are seven with more in the works.  Inter-urban trains are modern and convenient, with the train from Santiago to the popular resort town of Vina del Mar running through vineyards of noted Chilean vintners.  An older commuter train from Vina down to the larger town of Valparaiso has been replaced by a new system.  

Valparaiso is crowded up against the mountains with pastel-hued houses rising at steep angles above the harbor.   There were once twenty-six public funiculars or platforms mounted to rails to haul passengers and cargo up and down the city.  Build mostly between 1883 and 1920, only eight are now used.  But to get to one of Pablo Neruda’s homes, open now as a museum, a Valparaiso “ascensor” is the way to go.

Chiloe is a large island further south, at the start of another of the extreme geographies in the country.  Across the sound to the east and a little further south the road ends in fjord and island and mountain country.  To get to Chile’s end, many hundreds more miles, an air ship or boat is required.  To get to Chiloe itself, several large ferries carrying trucks, cars and passengers run the half hour trip throughout the day.  On the Island fishing boats abound and farming remains dominant.  When we drove through the island to the town of Castro with its palafitos or wooden houses built on stilts over the bay, we saw local busses jamming up narrow parts of the road alongside flat bed milk  trucks loaded with ten gallon galvanized milk cans from dairy farmers’ roadside platforms.

In addition to trains and networks of busses (express, local and in-between) throughout Chile, public transport, or mass transit or cooperative and entrepreneurial people-moving is frequently done at scale.  Not only do the Santiago metro trains handle 2,500,000 riders a day and thousands of taxis take people by ones and twos around cities and villages, but in some areas not served by busses you can stand on a street corner and hail fixed-route taxis - privately owned cars that run along set street routes.  

But in the past decade Santiago’s mass transit endeavor has sputtered with planning and operational debacles while trying to catch up with demand.  Bus and train schedules are erratically met. New bigger, cleaner busses replaced smaller smoky ones, but could not maneuver some Santiago streets.  Busses are privately operated and heavily subsidized.  Fare avoidance has risen.  Fewer bigger companies dominate.  Conservatives argue that replacement of the old system, where drivers were paid by the number of tickets sold, with a salary plan misaligned incentives. The air quality has improved and traffic would certainly be even worse without expansion, but wise travelers will schedule Santiago-area travel to avoid rush hours.

(Much of this is recollected from my first and only trip to Chile nearly twenty years ago. I have updated some with internet research.)

Jay Wilkinson