Red Type D transit-style buses, many of which have Blue Bird bodies, form the core of Guatemala City’s bus system. Interurban Type C conventional buses interface with the main urban routes at nodes throughout the city. See, for example, the aerial picture of Trébol below.
About twelve Route 57 buses are queued along the overpass at the bottom of the picture. A couple blocks up, more than twenty intercity buses are queued along the street. When I walked through here to catch a bus to Antigua, the honking intercity buses were all constantly creeping forward. Boarding passengers had to navigate the crowd of people, scan the headsigns for their destinations, and jump onto the appropriate bus all while trying to avoid being run over.
The municipal government is starting to introduce a new bus rapid transit system (in which the buses actually come to a complete stop for boarding and about which more will be posted soon), but implementation is fairly slow, and the old red buses are sure to be around for a while.
See a satellite view of Guatemala City.
STN’s Stewart is a graduate of Swarthmore College and a recipient of a 2010 Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, a grant to study abroad. Stewart’s project is “School Bus Migrations: Recycling Transit in the Global South. Follow his blog and see more photos from his journey.
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