Several multi-lane highways run the length and breadth of the city, cutting across and dividing neighbourhoods. Most are six to eight lanes, accommodating streams of buses, trucks, cars, taxis, motorbikes, and cyclists if they dare. The public transport network of polluting Volvo diesel buses is chaotic and it is hard, inefficient work to traverse the city. Armies of taxis fill the gap for those that can afford it but ultimately only serve to exacerbate the issue, putting more vehicles on the already over-stretched roads. Bogotá’s city planning, or lack thereof, seems to be stifled by both rapid growth and political deadlock over key long-term infrastructure projects, such as the desperate need for an underground metro system.
Security concerns are an ongoing preoccupation, born from years of not so distant civil unrest. As an outsider I am wary to use the word paranoia, though I have heard some Colombians talk in these terms. Ownerships of both commercial and domestic properties are often defined with high walls, dense metal fences and barbed wire crests. Who is to say what threat is real and what is perceived, but in my own very short experience of Bogotá I have found much of any hostility to be architectural.
