3/17/2008

The Metrovias serves the city of Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina.
It was inaugurated on December 1st, 1913, making it the oldest metro system in Latin America, the Southern Hemisphere, and, indeed in the entire Spanish-speaking world.
It is a privately owned company that took over operations in January 1994, as part of a railway privatization during the presidency of Carlos Menem.


This picture from Wikipedia; it is of the Vintage Line "A" entrance way on Avenida de Mayo(or May Avenue).
This street or avenue extends 1,500 metres in a west-east direction, and is often compared with those of Madrid, Barcelona and Paris due to its sophisticated buildings of art Nouveau, neoclassic and eclectic styles.
The decree 437/97 of the National Executive Branch declared the Avenue a national historic site in 1997. As a result the aesthetics of the buildings could not be changed, including billboards and marquees.

Here is some subway art from four different stations on the system.
The fare is 90 Cents (about USD 0.28) and in fact is actually cheaper than the city buses.
Riders purchase either single-use or multi-use cards (called SubtePass) with a magnetic strip or use “Contactless” cards called SubteCard which can be rechargeable with cash or linked to a bank account for automatic debit.
Now why do we not have something like this on our transit system?



The current network comprises six underground lines (labelled "A" to "E" and "H"), and is further identified by different colours, covering a total track length of 52 km.

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