City Series: Mexico City

The density conspiracy & pushing the limits of infrastructure

In my recent obsession - Dune - the galactic empire puts house Atreides in charge of the planet Arrakis, which is critical for its commodity, spice melange. The spice is harvested in wide swaths of ‘uninhabitable’ desert. Except the deep desert has some inhabitants, the fremen. We learn about the fremen first through the lens of the empire, and they are have very little idea about how the fremen actually live, or how advanced they are.

To force an analogy here, there is a fremen-style ignorance about what density looks like in other places, because in Canada density has a specific style (tall ‘condos’ coupled with lots of sprawl). It’s not that Canadian density is bad, but it leaves us with an misleading image of how broadly higher density would change our cities.

First, lets do some comparisons. Mexico city has over 10km that is as dense as Toronto’s densest core. It also does not see a rapid drop off in density after the core - cough cough the Annex / Kitsilano - density is largely flat in Mexico City.

If you play around on Google Maps in Mexico City, you’ll find most streets just look like tightly packed 2-4 storey buildings, with the occasional 5-10 storey building. It is not a wasteland of glassy condos that we have in dense areas. But it packs more density than we have nearly anywhere in Canada.

Obviously, it needs to be mentioned that Mexico is a much poorer country than Canada, CDMX has its own housing problems, and some of the density comes from what we’d consider overcrowding. But the same impression can be taken from much-richer neighborhoods in Tokyo, another megacity. Megacities can have quiet streets and calm neighborhoods that feel more like an idyllic northeast sawmill town than a global financial center.

The Limits of Infrastructure

The other distinctive part of Mexico City is traffic. According to TomTom’s global traffic index, it takes on average 63% longer than it should to drive around in Mexico City, tied for the second worse globally.

And it’s not like Mexico City hasn’t tried to fix it traffic problem. Many roads in and around the city are tolled, and still busy. There is a solid subway system that is busy. There are dedicated rapid bus lanes with high frequencies that are busy. It just seems like a city that is overwhelmed on every front. The infrastructure just can’t keep pace with 20 million people.

But there’s always another margin of change available. Individual behaviour. If you can’t bus or drive around, what can you do? Well, you can walk (or bike). CDMX naturally pushes people to walk, it might even be the fastest choice for walks up to 20-30 minutes, depending on time of day and route.

You can also always just make fewer trips. Some describe CDMX as a city of neighborhoods, and I think that’s partially reinforced by the sheer difficulty of leaving your neighborhood. Luckily (or necessarily?), most neighborhoods have taco spots, shops, markets, and a range of businesses to meet day to day needs.

But sometimes, you need to cross the city. Ideally, that’s outside of rush hour (which lasts a while - peak spreading is the technical term). In my time there, I went to see Dune: Part 2 and a weeknight football game. In both cases, the event started only about a half full crowd - but was 90%+ full by the end. Now, maybe people don’t care about missing 15 minutes of Timothée, but the football game was a big deal, an rivalry game among two of Mexico’s most popular clubs. It’s unfortunate that many folks are missing out on big events just because they can’t get there in time.

I think there are lessons for Halifax. We don’t have excellent (read: high capacity) roads into downtown. The bus system is unreliable. We haven’t build a new harbour crossing in 54 years. And we’re in the process of reducing road capacity with the Cogswell district project. That’s part of the reason why, according to TomTom, Halifax has the second slowest rush hour driving speeds in Canada (first being Montreal).

Halifax’s high capacity roads end at the top of the peninsula

As the city surges towards a million people, we need to ramp up our infrastructure, prepare for much worse traffic, or get accustomed to not being able to move around at all.