Argentina

What the record shows

Buenos Aires keeps the asset and skips the audit. Almost uniquely in this atlas, the city has chosen public ownership over concession again and again — it bought its streetlights outright, it registered its waste pickers instead of policing them, it licensed every dataset in its catalogue. And the checking layer went missing at almost the same rate. The result is a record where the question is rarely who owns the instrument, and almost always who is entitled to look at what it produced.

The sharpest case is the one that ended in court. In April 2019 the city switched on a facial-recognition system matching live feeds from about 300 of its cameras against the national fugitives list — a list carrying names and ID numbers but no photographs, so the reference faces came from the national identity registry instead. The law confined the system to people on that list, some thirty-five to forty thousand of them. The judicial file records 9,392,372 biometric queries to the identity registry between April 2019 and December 2021, and over half a million more by that March, covering roughly seven and a half million people. The Legislature's oversight commission was never seated and the ombudsman's audit never happened, so the nine million queries surfaced only when a court demanded the logs. A statutory limit is worth exactly as much as the body that enforces it.

The same gap, in a gentler form, runs through the entries the city is proud of. Its LED conversion was tendered in 2013 as a single supply-and-install contract that procured a telemanagement system alongside the luminaires, so Buenos Aires owns the network and runs the control room rather than granting a concession the way São Paulo, Washington D.C. and Lonato did. Every point is individually addressable, and the fleet passed 202,500 luminaires by June 2026. The reported savings — more than half the energy of the sodium fixtures replaced, with lower maintenance and fewer complaints — are self-reported and have stayed unaudited for a decade, while the procurement itself drew an adverse audit. Owning the asset is not the same as owning the outcome. BA Elige makes the point by disappearing: three editions of an online participatory budget between 2017 and 2019, during which site visits fell from 6.4 million to 1.59 million and winning projects from 443 to 108, documented in the city's own dataset in fine detail on turnout and not at all on delivery.

Where the city shares a jurisdiction, the missing measurement is structural rather than optional. Metrobús laid bus lanes and platforms over the existing bus network instead of restructuring services into trunk-and-feeder routes as Bogotá did — faster and cheaper, and the buses are run by concessionaires the national government regulates. Buenos Aires ended up with lanes it can enforce by camera and a fleet it cannot measure itself; the corridor figures in circulation are promoters' numbers, and no independent before-and-after evaluation exists. The Maldonado relief tunnels show the budgeting version of the same problem. Two bored tunnels have carried the culverted stream's overflow since 2012, sized for a one-in-ten-year storm, and water enters them hydraulically — no sensor sits in that loop. The measuring layer was a separate component of the same World Bank loan, and it is the one that did not get finished; the Bank's own evaluation group rated the project's outcome moderately unsatisfactory and drew the lesson that structural and non-structural components need separate implementation arrangements. Bundling concrete and instruments in one budget rewards the concrete.

Two entries show the city getting the ownership question right in ways worth copying. After the 2001 crisis Buenos Aires stopped policing its cartoneros and started registering them: a 2002 law created a compulsory register of waste pickers and of their cooperatives, brought them into the city's differentiated collection service with credentials and work clothing, and gave twelve cooperatives assigned zones and the green centres that sort the material. It is a formalisation scheme that names the cooperative behind every zone in open data — and publishes tonnage only by plant type, so nobody outside city hall can say which cooperative recovered what. Ecobici is run by the same operator as Bogotá's bike share and the money flows the opposite way: Buenos Aires pays the operator under a ten-year concession, where Bogotá is paid in bike parking and supervises a system whose data feed it does not own. Residents here still ride free on weekdays, up to four half-hour trips a day — though only for residents, only on weekdays, and only after the law's promise of a wholly free system had been quietly narrowed. Who pays whom is the question that decides what a concession protects.

The rest of the record is unusually candid about its own ceilings. The Subte's resignalling put modern moving-block control on three of six lines and never claimed more than it had: it runs attended automatic operation with the driver in the cab, and no line is driverless or certified to be. The city's audit office found Line D reached a three-minute peak headway while the promised two minutes fifteen could not be verified in practice for lack of rolling stock — signalling sets the floor on headway, the fleet sets the actual service. The open-data portal is fully licensed and unusually well kept: 451 datasets, every one of them licensed and all under attribution terms that meet the Open Definition, with 416 updated within the previous twelve months — a maintenance record most catalogues on this ladder cannot match. Its flaw is a drafting one — the licence rule lives in an operational guide rather than in the binding articles of the decree, and only five datasets carry the version the guide says is always applied. And SUBE, the national fare card, turns a ticket into a means-tested welfare instrument, with the caveat built in: the discount headline stays fixed while the fare it is calculated against moves, so the subsidy's real value is a dial the treasury can turn without touching the rate. If the entries below agree on one lesson, it is that Buenos Aires has been better at holding onto its infrastructure than at letting anyone check what it does.