Excesses at the start of operation of the metro in Quito

Hundreds of people carried out excesses on Tuesday at the beginning of the operations of the Quito underground metro and jumped the controls to travel without paying because the ticket offices could not supply the unexpected demand of users.

Since dawn, hundreds of passengers congregated at the south station, where there were two ticket offices that did not allow an adequate flow of citizens, which triggered protests and dozens jumping the controls to get on the wagons. Shortly after the incidents the operators allowed free access to avoid further problems.

The mayor of Quito, Santiago Guarderas, published on his Twitter account that “there are drawbacks that will be polished, in order to offer an impeccable service to the people of Quito in a short time.”

The system worked in recent weeks with invitation tickets so that citizens become familiar, but the number of people on its first day of operations tripled. After the initial failures, the situation returned to normal, to which the opening of more ticket offices in the stations with the highest concentration of passengers contributed.

The metro has not yet been formally inaugurated and there is no date for it, among other reasons, because at the end of this month the new mayor of the capital, Pabel Muñoz, must take office, who will set the schedule for it. Its inauguration had successive postponements because the authorities had not decided which company would operate it, a task that was finally handed over to a consortium led by Metro Medellín.

The system began to be built in 2013 and it is a single line that runs through the Ecuadorian capital from south to north; It has 15 stations along almost 23 kilometers and a fleet of 18 trains.

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