When 6 million people lose their transit system

This post could otherwise be entitled, a few metro lines go down, and chaos ensues.  Around 7:00 this morning an electrical shortage downed large sections of three of the five metro lines in Santiago.  The result was a city full of people left scrambling to find other means of getting to work.  As of 4 pm this afternoon there are still 24 stations closed and hundreds of thousands of folks facing long and unpleasant commutes home.

In many cities around the world, especially in the U.S., finding alternative transportation would be annoying, but certainly not chaotic.  In Santiago, however, a 2007 major over-haul of the transit system occurred, which essentially outlawed an abundance of private buses (known as "micros) that were operating simultaneously with the public options.  The private buses posed some serious pedestrian-safety flaws that needed to be addressed, but otherwise it offered a popular, efficient and profitable method of transportation.  Under the new system, the Chilean government expanded the metro capacity, but drastically limited the convenient "point to point" bus service.  With fewer transportation alternatives, the metros are now overcrowded with commuters, who are then left without any reasonable mode of transportation in the event of a metro malfunction.    

An economist friend of ours, who has been a frequent visitor to Santiago for over a decade, offered an interesting and much more thorough perspective of this transformation in 2008:  http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2008/Mungerbus.html  His article also offers some great insights into the economic culture of this city and the country.    

The Santiago metro services about 2.5 million users daily.  The news today had constant footage of these individuals running en masse to get to buses already stuffed so full of people that the doors had difficulty closing.  Those on the stuffed buses were the "lucky" ones, because once many of these people reached the bus stops, there were already swarms of people hoping to encounter a similar fate.  Keep in mind that the temperature today was almost 90 degrees.

                                                                            
Take a taxi, some might say.  If one was able to find an available cab, the traffic jam created by this mess likely would have taken a person 2-3 hours longer than normal to arrive at their destination.  The alternative for many was a very lengthy walk to work.