ALEX MARSHALL
Metropolis Magazine
October 2001
The startling truth about San Juan, a metropolitan area of 1.4 million people in Puerto Rico, is that most of it looks like New Jersey. It is a landscape of ugly roadways lined with strip malls, American franchise restaurants, and glass office towers overlooking impenetrable limited-access highways. Sure, there is Old San Juan, the sixteenth-century fortified city with its tiny cobblestone streets. But that citadel of the picturesque, which sits on a point of land in the harbor, is a tiny speck in San Juan’s overall breadth. The bulk of the city was developed after World War II, when tax breaks and other incentive programs brought in industry. And in good postwar fashion, American and Puerto Rican engineers and urban planners heavily promoted the highway as the proper spine for development.
With the construction of the Tren Urbano (Urban Train), San Juan, Puerto Rico, hopes to find a mass transportation solution to its dependency on congested highways.
Two generations later, San Juan has reaped the result. Although its citizens earn substantially less than stateside Americans, they actually own more cars per capita. In fact, Puerto Rico has one of the highest car-ownership rates in the world. Traffic is horrible. Residents tell stories of once ten-minute drives that now take several hours. Buses exist, both public and private, but they are trapped in the same traffic jams as the private cars.
Enter the Tren Urbano (Urban Train), a 10.7-mile, $2 billion heavy-rail system scheduled for completion in 2003. Its planners are attempting something extremely difficult: altering a landscape produced by one type of transportation, the highway, by introducing a different type of transportation, an elevated train line. The risk in this type of urban surgery is that the patient will reject the alien transplant. Parts of the line travel through older streetcar suburbs, which have remnants of a traditional urban fabric. But the bulk of the project goes through postwar highway-oriented development, which is the most difficult to adapt to mass transit.
Elmo Ortiz, the urban design manager for the project, is well aware of the challenges it faces. Like most of the staff, Ortiz works in a blockish brick building located off a busy highway. “We have sprawl, sprawl, sprawl,” says Ortiz, whose face is ringed with a corona of white beard and hair. “The transformation of the geography of this place is incredible.”
Tren Urbano has a chance of working, Ortiz says, because it is intended to facilitate the development of a new type of city, not just to transport people: “We are trying to create a new urban form.” He and others envision the conversion of the rail corridor into destinations where people can live, shop, and work around the stations.
“We need to bring development back into the cities, instead of continuing with the sprawl that we have throughout the island,” says Javier Mirand’s, manager of architecture at Tren Urbano. “We need higher-density housing with minimum parking and good access to transit. This is the first time in sixty years that there will be a dependable transit system on the island.”
In this, Puerto Rico is not unlike so many other American cities trying to fight sprawl with new passenger rail systems: Portland, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and even Las Vegas have adopted similar projects in recent years. The greater challenge is that Puerto Rico resembles other Latin American cities in its high levels of crime and general paranoid atmosphere of security. Even convenience stores often buzz in customers. Apartment towers have double-entry security at the parking lot and inside the building. Wrought-iron gates and bars, which at first might appear decorative, encase many suburban homes. Many once accessible public streets have been gated and locked, privatized by their community. “How do you create housing around stations where people want to live in a gated community?” Ortiz ponders out loud, grimacing at the challenge.
Mass transit is difficult in such high-crime, high-fear regions, because people don’t want to associate with strangers. A related problem is race: lower-class Puerto Ricans tend to be dark-skinned, and whiter upper-class citizens may shy from using mass transit if it requires them to encounter poorer commuters.
But as in other countries, Puerto Ricans are now talking about “smart growth,” environmental protection, and different living patterns. “There has been a big shift in environmental consciousness, and that is going to help us redevelop cities and control sprawl,” Mirand’s says.
A specter hanging over the project is the fate of another expensive elevated train line: in 1984 a $1 billion, 21-mile elevated Metrorail line opened in Miami. Isolated by sprawl, it has attracted few riders and is widely considered an enormous white elephant.
Maurice Ferre, mayor of Miami from 1973 to 1985 and a native of Puerto Rico, predicts a better chance for the Tren Urbano because it goes through more work centers, such as the university and Rio Piedras. But San Juan will have to expand its system if it wants long-term success, he says: “Metrorail in Miami is a failure because it is an unfinished system. It’s like taking a table with four legs, and only building one leg and expecting it to stand. Structurally the two are similar, but I think the one in San Juan will be more successful.”
Aníbal Sepúlveda, professor of urban planning at the University of Puerto Rico and author of the book San Juan: An Illustrated History of Its Urban Development, is pessimistic about the project’s chances, even while he hopes for its success. “I have not seen enough effort to plan around the stations,” he says. “It will not come automatically. There is such a low density. At the same time, we are still building highways and making it easier for developers to build tract houses.”
Sepúlveda also questions the appropriateness of an elevated train line. “We chose the most expensive project for the city, but not necessarily the best one,” he says. “It’s too much money. We will not be able to build future lines with the same technology.”
Because it is a heavy-rail system, Tren Urbano can move immense numbers of people cheaply. But it will only be cost-effective if enough people actually use it. Officials project an initial ridership of 100,000 a day, which is predicted to rise to 115,000 by year 2010. At those levels, revenues from the fares would pay about half the operating costs, which is typical for mass transit.
Ironically, the key factor in the project’s favor is San Juan’s horrible and worsening traffic, which may motivate commuters to take the train. With a $2 billion investment, San Juan and Puerto Rico have placed an expensive bet on the table. They may win a city with choices other than highways and sprawl, or lose both money and hope that a sprawl-oriented city and its citizens can ever be changed.