Max Bermúdez, an engineer and urban planner, has a proposal to build an aerial peripheral metro-train that runs parallel to Circunvalación Road and the Greater Metropolitan Area (GAM).
Bermúdez, who has 30 years of experience in the field and as a university lecturer, has been working on the issue. This idea suggests a more feasible solution than the construction of an underground subway, and he intends to propose it to the Association of Engineers and Architects (CFIA).
The engineer argues that the different topographic levels in the capital would complicate the construction of an underground service, but an aerial solution would imply advantages for the State, not having to make expropriations. This idea also ensures saving space on the roads, both because no more units of public transport would be needed, and because of the decrease in private vehicles.
The Road of Circunvalación is about 20 kilometers long and some of that land has been partially occupied by housing units.
Leiner Vargas, director of the International Center for Economic Policy for Sustainable Development of the National University (CINPE) said that, technically speaking, there are no problems to build this type of train in the country. However, the construction of said project would be somewhat more expensive than a building a regular train on the railway line.
Jonathan Agüero, a researcher from the Research Program on Sustainable Urban Development (ProDUS) of the University of Costa Rica (UCR), agreed that such a project would imply high costs and added that these systems require cities where the volume of users exceeds one million people per day, but in the GAM there would only be about 400,000.
Agüero is more inclined to building a double lane for buses as the best and most inexpensive option to deal with the problem of traffic jams.