Lima

Lima's rapid transit corridor opened in July 2010 and, fifteen years on, is still formally preoperative. El Metropolitano carries about 480,000 trips a day, up from 420,000 at the start of 2025, and riders still pay with the system's own card while the region's interoperable card runs on the metro instead. An Inter-American Development Bank working paper using a difference-in-differences design found large effects on employment, hours worked and labour earnings for people living close to the trunk stations — and none for those near the feeder lines, and no evidence of any effect for populations in lower-income areas. Eleven of the seventeen northern-extension stations stand built and closed, waiting on a contract addendum and buses. The binding constraint on a mature corridor is usually contractual rather than technical, and here it has been for a decade and a half.

The metro repeats the pattern in the newer half of the network. Billed by its concessionaire as Peru's first underground automated line, Línea 2 opened a five-station, five-kilometre stretch in December 2023 — five of the 27 stations promised under a 2014 concession — with trains commanded from a central control room. It has carried 19.6 million passengers since, with a record month in May 2026, and the remaining stages are now due in 2029 and 2030 against an original target of February 2017 for the first of them. Driverless trains were the procurable part; the tunnels and the timetable were not. A regulator file from July 2026 shows the ministry and the concessionaire arguing over whether a scheduled interval of four minutes and 34 seconds may be met with a statistical tolerance, and no source dates the day staff stopped riding along — the contract required an operator aboard for the first three months.

The two smaller entries are the ones where something actually reaches a household. Recicla Lima lets residents of the historic central district enter an address and find the formal recycler assigned to their route, showing that person's name, experience and years worked — trust built by naming somebody rather than by tracking a truck — and recovered about 1,445 tonnes of recyclables in its first full year through a network of more than 378 formalised recyclers in thirteen associations. From November 2024 the water utility began piloting meters that let staff close and reopen a household's supply valve remotely within seconds, which the utility calls a first in its history; the initial stage covered about 43 meters, prioritising hospitals, clinics, community dining halls and schools, with service restoring automatically once an overdue bill is paid.