Bogotá Metro Line 1 — elevated first line, built for driverless running
Bogotá spent decades cancelling metro plans; a concession signed in November 2019 with China Harbour Engineering and Xi'an Rail Transportation Group finally put 23.96 km of elevated viaduct and 16 stations under construction, with the contractual works phase starting in August 2021. The city reported 80.37% overall progress at 30 June 2026 and ten of thirty CRRC Changchun trainsets delivered by April 2026. The fleet is contracted for unattended GoA4 running over CBTC, and energised automatic test runs began on the viaduct in May 2026 — with a technician in the cab, which the mayor says applies to testing only. Trial running is promised for September 2027 and commercial service for March 2028, the date written into the 2019 concession. In January 2025 the national government deferred COP 770bn of its own contribution, and the supervising engineer put the works marginally behind schedule at mid-2025.
In build
📅 since 2019
✔ Editor-reviewed
🎓 Lesson
Across this atlas, the word driverless has rarely survived opening day intact. Bogotá's is contracted, part-delivered and under test — and no source yet says whether staff will ride at launch. Worth recording before the ribbon is cut, not after.
Evidence• No measured figure
Scale🏙️ City-wide
Cost≈COP 12.9tn (constant 2017 pesos, 2017 co-financing agreement)
Funding70% national government / 30% Bogotá district; multilateral lenders IDB, World Bank and EIB
Sources
↗ Alcaldía de Bogotá — Line 1 reaches 80.37% progressFetched successfully. Carries the sentence 'Con corte al 30 de junio de 2026, el proyecto alcanzó un 80,37 % de avance general', the September 2027 marcha blanca date, and the note that test trains have reached Station 4 at 90 km/h. Official, self-reported by the city.
↗ Alcaldía de Bogotá — 77.53% progress, April 2026Fetched successfully. Source for the tenth of thirty trainsets arriving in Bogotá in April 2026, and for the monthly progress series (75.50% March, 77.53% April, 78.69% May). Official.
↗ Alcaldía de Bogotá — Line 1 technical specificationsFetched successfully. Source for 30 six-car trainsets at 1,800 passengers each, fully automatic operation without drivers supervised from the Control Centre, CBTC signalling, 750 V DC third rail, platform screen doors, 42.5 km/h commercial speed and 140-second initial headway. This is the operator's own definition of GoA4 — it is a contractual specification, not an observation of service.
↗ Alcaldía de Bogotá — Line 1 will have 16 stationsSource for 23.96 km, 16 stations, Bosa to Calle 72, eight stations integrated directly with TransMilenio and two by proximity. Verified through the search index of this official page; the page itself was not fetched in this review.
↗ International Railway Journal — Chinese consortium selected for Bogotá metro contractTrade press, October 2019. Source for the award to APCA Transmimetro (China Harbour Engineering Company 85%, Xi'an Rail Transportation Group 15%) and the design-finance-build-operate-maintain-transfer structure. Verified via search listing; not fetched. The concession vehicle Metro Línea 1 S.A.S. is confirmed on the Empresa Metro de Bogotá site.
↗ Railway Gazette / Metro Report — First Bogotá metro trainset starts testingTrade press, 25 April 2025. Independent confirmation that the 30 six-car sets are fully automated CRRC Changchun stock, that the first set began testing at the Changchun plant, and that trial operation is scheduled for September 2027 with commercial service in March 2028. DIRECT FETCH RETURNED HTTP 403; content verified from the outlet's own search listing and corroborated by the city pages above.
↗ Infobae — supervising engineer's report on delays and workplace accidentsFetched successfully. The interventoría report at cut-off 30 June 2025 recorded 51.97% actual progress against 53.14% planned; 73 workplace incidents in May 2025 alone (62 minor, two serious, nine without incapacity), 106 unsafe acts and 204 unsafe conditions; 2,028 concessionaire claims for unforeseen works, of which the supervisor recommended rejecting 1,007; and that the concessionaire's own safety reporting 'continúa siendo deficiente en calidad y completitud'. The strongest counterweight in the entry.
↗ Noticias RCN — first controlled rides with people aboardFetched successfully. 29 May 2026, a roughly 30-minute controlled run between stations 1 and 2 in Kennedy with people aboard. Carries Mayor Galán's sentence 'El conductor solo está presente durante las pruebas'. This is the only located statement addressing on-board staffing, and it is the mayor's, not an independent verification of what opening day will carry.
↗ El Universal — national government defers metro funds27 January 2025. The finance ministry's deferral decree suspended COP 770bn of budgeted national contributions to the metro; the district said the transfers 'no son un favor' and that it would cover the gap. A councillor filed a nullity action in February 2025 — the Concejo de Bogotá page documenting that filing returned HTTP 503 to automated fetch.
↗ Infobae — Petro calls the elevated metro 'urbanicidio'11 April 2025. Documents that the presidential campaign against the elevated design continued years after the 2023 attempt to bury the northern section failed; the district's position then was that a contract change was 'jurídicamente imposible y técnicamente inviable'. The alignment was never changed.
↗ Infobae — machinery from the works falls on a TransMilenio bus12–13 September 2025, Carrera 30 with Calle 16 Sur: part of the construction machinery fell onto a bus, four people injured, none seriously; Empresa Metro de Bogotá demanded measures from the concessionaire and an investigation was opened. Search- and fetch-corroborated across two outlets.
↗ Empresa Metro de Bogotá — total cost of Line 1The operator's own cost page. DIRECT FETCH RETURNED HTTP 503 twice. Its indexed text gives COP 12,945,270,024,403 in constant December 2017 pesos under the co-financing agreement of 9 November 2017, with the nation carrying 70%. Figures circulating in current pesos are higher and are not used here. A separate claim of 'cost overruns above COP 2.3tn' could not be tied to any named dated source and was cut.
↗ Contraloría de Bogotá — audit of the metro's feeder trunk worksContext, deliberately kept out of the snippet: the joint audit with the Contraloría General found 22 findings and a fiscal finding of about COP 18.18bn, but these concern the FEEDER AND COMPLEMENTARY TRUNK WORKS contracted through TransMilenio, not the viaduct or the concession described here. Recorded so a future editor does not misattribute it to Line 1's construction contract.
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Bogotá Metro Line 1 — elevated first line, built for driverless running” — Bogotá, Colombia. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/bogota-metro-line-1/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.
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