Mexico: A New Chapter In The “Leitner Success Story”

The Mexico ropeway system is already beating all records and providing safe, fast, environment-friendly mobility. Now, with the completion and opening of the “Mexicable 2 – Línea Verde”, the latest line completes an effective system of independent ropeways that deliver transport with the very highest level of efficiency and sustainability.

The city of Ecatepec de Morelos, which has a population in the millions and forms part of the Mexico City metropolitan area, has become global pioneer in the integration of ropeways into its urban transport system. This success story began seven years ago, with the construction of the “Mexicable 1 – Línea Roja”, five kilometres long.

Since its commissioning the system, which operates for more than 18 hours every day and has proved extremely popular with users, has clocked up more than 41 million journeys, with an exemplary reliability of 99.8%. The secret of this success lies partly in the impressive time saving compared to car travel: via the ropeway, users can access the metropolis’s public transport network in just 19 minutes, compared to 50 minutes in nose-to-tail traffic.

The “Línea Verde” fills a major gap

The official opening of the “Mexicable 2 – Línea Verde” on 30 March 2023 fills a major gap in the Ecatepec de Morelos ropeway network. In future the system, which consists of three interconnected ropeways, will transport about 35,000 people from the municipalities of Ecatepec de Morelos and Tlalnepantla de Baz to Mexico City every day, and also help to conserve the Zacatenco protected areas of natural beauty in the Gustavo A. Madero district thanks to its low noise emissions.

With its carefully designed route, the “Línea Verde” is the perfect completion of the public transport network. Starting from the second station on the “Línea Roja”, this ropeway, with a length of 8.5 kilometres, conveys passengers in about 300 gondolas to the Indios Verdes subway station, with a total of seven stops.

“This provides local residents with convenient, safe, quick access to the subway network. The link consists of three ropeways installed one after the other, each with one middle station: including the termini, there are a total of seven stations. The use of three independent systems gives us greater flexibility, enabling us to ensure peak reliability in the transport services,” said Giacomo Trattenero, from the LEITNER Sales Team.

The topography of the area and its construction density proved to be a serious challenge.

“In view of the very tight spaces available, sometimes we had to deliver materials at night, and often we could only use cranes and small trucks. Since we had to cross one of Mexico City’s busiest motorways, and closing it was not an option, we even had to use drones to lay the first rope along the line’s pylons,” assembly director Patrick Rudigier explained.

Mexico City: just 36 minutes to the subway interchange

A LEITNER ropeway has also been making a huge contribution to slimming down city traffic in the Iztapalapa district, in the south-east of Greater Mexico City, since 2021. More than 10 kilometres long, the “Cablebus 2” offers the catchment area’s 1.8 million residents a much better transport link to workplaces, schools and leisure venues. Here again, the crucial factor in the new transport system’s high approval rating has been the sharp acceleration in mobility it provides: at just 36 minutes, journey time on this route has been more than halved.