Transportation within Mexico City is what you’d expect from any modern city. Taxis, buses, trains, rideshare all are present and work as you’d expect.
Mexico City’s traffic is notoriously congested but it is certainly worse in some areas than others. Our favorite method of transport was a tossup between ride sharing and metro.
We only rode the bus once in Mexico City and it was one of the older buses that didn’t have an electronic fare system so you needed to pay in cash. The ride was 7 pesos and we didn’t have any change. The driver took pity and let us ride for free. But with the traffic combined with the generally ideal weather we mostly would just walk. If we needed to go farther we’d take the metro.
I see many people in facebook groups asking if the metro is safe. I’m not sure how to answer that other than to say that I felt safe. The systems are heavily used by locals, though I never felt like I noticed other foreigners using them. But you see all kinds of people, young, old, students, white collar workers, blue collar workers… pretty much what you’d expect in a large US city.
Ride sharing
Ride sharing in Mexico City seems to be run by two app providers. Uber and DiDi. I hadn’t used DiDi before but since I saw folks saying that it is often lower in cost I went ahead and set up an account. It works pretty much just like Uber, no surprises there. Folks from the US may be wondering about Lyft, but they don’t operate here in Mexico City.
Biggest difference I’ve seen with rideshare here is when it comes to tipping. Instead of the app offering a percentage of the fair, it just offers 3 fixed tip amounts. 10, 15 or 20 pesos. (Between 50 cents and a dollar USD). Rides around town are much less expensive than we’ve experienced in other big cities. Most of our rides have been 90~150 pesos. Depending on distance and weather.
The Metro
There are a number of lines in Mexico City but they don’t seem to be as dense in the Polanco area where we were staying. But with just a 20 minute walk we could be at the Polanco orange station and could connect from there to any of the others.
The cost of the metro was 5 pesos per person and they use an electronic system for payment. (Which I understand is also used by the bus network, but from our experience, not all of them).
The metro is really nice for beating the gridlocked traffic and from the maybe dozen or so times we used it, the wait times were never more than a few minutes.
Metro cards
When we first attempted to use the system we were not sure how it worked so we went over to one of the kiosks in an attempt to acquire a metro card but clearly that’s not how it works. Thankfully a helpful stranger who seemed to speak about as much English as we do Spanish…maybe a little less, had an extra card without a balance on it that she gave to us. She also explained that the kiosks only took cash.
I will say that we never successfully managed to load money onto the card from the kiosk. The handful of times that I added more money, I just went to one of the ticket windows and handed them money to load.
One thing of note. I’m not the most experienced metro rider but we have been to places that don’t like for more than one person to use the same card. That’s not an issue in Mexico City. I was always able to just swipe and hand the card back to Chrissy and she was able to use it to swipe again. When you swipe your card it also shows the remaining balance. Very helpful.
Cablebus
The coolest part of the Mexico City metro system is the Cablebus. I believe that there are 3 lines which seem to exist at the edges of the train based metro. Floating above the traffic in near silence is just awesome. The system works a little bit like a ski lift in that the cars don’t come to a complete stop. They slow down at the stations and you step on and off while they are still moving. It’s not so hard to do but I did notice that the folks at the stations that monitor the system will ask that folks sit farther into the cars leaving the seats next to the door available for new passengers so that they don’t have to cross over everyone in the moving car. One other thing that we noticed in the cable bus that we didn’t see anywhere else. Everyone seemed to greet new riders when they got in. We never saw that on the train but it was consistent in the cablebus. At first we thought, “oh, they must know each other” but after watching it time and time again we concluded that they didn’t and it was just some quirk about cablebus culture.
If you’re in Mexico City, you should absolutely use the Metro to travel when it makes sense. Also, you should go and check out one of the Cablebus lines. You should be able to take a metro to near one of the stations and switch lines.
I see folks online talking about booking tours with guides to ride these, and i’ll be the first to admit that having someone knowledgeable to point out and describe things that are not so obvious, and also to explain things can be great. That said, if you just want to fly above CDMX in these awesome cars, you can easily do it yourself. And it only costs like 5 pesos. (about a quarter USD).
