SIEMENS

No one is surprised any more when Roberto Vázquez takes off his helmet at the entrance to Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana (UAM) in Mexico City and pushes his bicycle through the corridors. Things weren't always this way. For several years now, Vázquez has been cycling seven kilometers to work, to the Azcapo-tzalco Campus where he organizes waste recycling, traveling through a city with 20 million inhabitants and more than four million vehicles—a city where the air used to be so poisonous that birds fell from the sky, as Environment Minister Martha Delgado reports (see interview). “Just a few years ago, people thought I was a suicidal maniac,” recalls Vázquez. He says it with a certain assurance, because he knows that he was one of the avantgarde.

Mexico City has declared that its goal is to become the greenest city in Latin America by 2022. Bicycles are one part of that strategy. Nowadays, cycle-taxis circle round the Zócalo, the enormous plaza in the city center. There are 85 city-bike stations and cycle paths are being introduced in ever more parts of the agglomeration. To Vázquez' satisfaction, one was recently built along the route between his apartment and the UAM. He now travels faster than most cars, without having to worry about being knocked down in the heavy traffic.

The valley in which Mexico City is located is at an altitude of 2,310 m above sea level. Due to the thin air, cars burn fuel less efficiently than at lower altitudes. And the chain of volcanoes surrounding the city makes it difficult for the wind to blow exhaust fumes away. About 20 years ago, the United Nations described Mexico's capital as the most polluted city in the world. Since then heavy industries have been relocated and a refinery near the Azcapotzalco Campus was closed. But traffic has continued to grows and is now responsible for most of the city's air pollution.

Although 80 % of trips in Mexico City are made via public transport, traffic jams are getting worse every day. “Many of the dirty ‘camiones'—extremely inefficient small buses—were taken off the road, but far too many still cause traffic jams,” says Susana García, a student at the UAM. For her dissertation, she calculated the carbon-dioxide balance of the daily commutes made by her fellow students and lecturers between their homes and the campus. The surprising result is that those persons using the “camiones” can cause more pollution than drivers of modern cars, even if the car drivers are alone. “The city urgently needs more urban railways,” concludes García.

With a total length of 450 km, Mexico City already has one of the longest urban railway networks in the world. But many regard it to be inadequate. It is now being expanded and modernized, as is the case in other big Mexican cities such as Monterrey and Guadalajara, which have two and four million inhabitants respectively. Monterrey, an industrial metropolis in the north of the country, opened an extension of its urban railway line 2 in late 2008; Siemens was responsible for pro-ject management and supplied systems for power supply, operational safety and communications infrastructure. In Guadalajara, Siemens is modernizing some of the fleet of metro trains. The trains are being fitted with new traction systems that consume 10 % less energy. And the city's urban railway network has been using signal systems from Siemens for many years.

Francisco Padilla, Managing Director of Siteur, the local transport company, jokes that “Our trains are now getting their long-overdue ‘manita de gato,' or cat-lick.” He sees the expansion of the public transport system as essential in Guadalajara. “Generally speaking, we don't have a mobility problem in big Mexican cities, we have an immobility problem. The fact that it's particularly dramatic in Mexico City is something like a blessing for the country's other big cities. That shocking example makes it clear to us how important it is to invest sustainably in a timely way.”

Rail transport is more environmentally friendly than private transportation not only because there are no local emissions, but because electricity in Mexico is increasingly generated without any CO₂ emissions. In the state of Oaxaca, there are strong and constant winds, sometimes even strong enough to blow trucks off the road. Wind conditions for electricity generation are among the world's best. And in the northern states of Tamaulipas and Baja California, the winds are strong enough for wind parks to be operated profitably.

One company that has already invested in renewable energy is Wal-Mart. Despite all its efforts to improve energy efficiency, the retail chain's 348 supermarkets in Mexico still have to operate a lot of power guzzlers such as refrigerated display cases. Wal-Mart therefore had its own wind park built with a total output of 67.5 MW. Siemens supplied the infrastructure for the park's connection to the national grid.

Siemens will also supply the turbines for another operator's wind park in Los Vergeles, Tamaulipas. Located on the Caribbean coast, the park is designed to produce more than 160 MW.