Mexico City Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera said that the federal government should create an exclusive fund for the Mexico City Metro in order to serve the residents of Mexico City and bordering municipalities in the State of Mexico.
“The federal government should understand that for metropolitan transport, a fund should exist specifically for the Metro,” he said at a ceremony where recently-repaired trains were reentering circulation. “More than two million people, 40 percent of people who use the Metro every day, are not from Mexico City.”
Mancera questioned the assignment of federal funds for the Mexico City-Toluca train, which will connect to the Observatorio Metro station, while the federal budget offers no funding for the Metro.
“This is truly an aberration, they offer no funding for expanding Line 12, Line A or Line 9,” he said. “But they gave 18 billion pesos ($9 million) for the Mexico City-Toluca train. This is absurd, truly absurd.”
The director of the Metro Collective Transportation System, Jorge Gaviño, warned that there is a risk that the Metro will be overwhelmed by the influx of passengers brought by the Mexico City-Toluca train if Lines A, 9 and 12 are not expanded.
“We are going to create a bottleneck,” he said. “The proposal needs to be seen, needs to be analyzed, we need a restructuring of mobility. It is illogical to build a train from Toluca, that will bring hundreds of thousands of people per week or month without having a release valve.”
He added that for 2016, 780 million pesos of federal funds were approved to extend the Gold Line’s Mixcoac station to Observatorio, but the city has still not received those funds, and the project will probably need to be suspended. Nor has the city received promised funds for the expansion of Line A or Line 9, according to Gaviño.
He aded that the modernization of Line 1 could also be delayed due to a lack of money.