Pico y Placa: Plate Rationing You Can Pay to Escape
Bogotá has rationed driving by plate digit since 1998, when it was a peak-hours measure introduced while TransMilenio was being built; under Decree 003 of 2023 it now runs Monday to Friday, 06:00 to 21:00, on a calendar odd-even rule. Cameras do much of the enforcing — the city's automatic and semi-automatic photo-detection network books the C14 restricted-hours offence, with an agent validating each capture before a ticket issues. Since 22 September 2020 drivers can also buy their way out: a permit priced by the vehicle's value, emissions and city of registration, sold through a plate-linked register, with every peso earmarked for the fund that subsidises public-transport fares. That exemption has become the point — it raised about COP 488 billion in 2025, and the mobility secretariat now says its aim is to discourage second cars rather than to clear the road.
A peer-reviewed evaluation of the 2020 paid-exemption reform (Montero, Sepulveda & Basso, Journal of the European Economic Association, accepted 2025) estimates average speeds fell about 9% while annual welfare rose by roughly US$222 million, because middle-income drivers gained about US$759 million against about US$506 million lost by higher-income drivers stuck in the extra traffic. Permit revenue reported by El Tiempo from Secretaria de Movilidad figures rose from COP 6.1 billion in 2020 to COP 488 billion in 2025, some COP 1.6 trillion cumulatively, with 446,853 daily permits bought in December 2025 and roughly 30,000 permit-bearing vehicles on the road each day, 3.5-4% of traffic. The Secretaria recorded 72,339 C14 restricted-hours fines in 2025, an average of 198 a day.
🎓 Lesson
Selling exemptions turns a rationing rule into a revenue stream, and the two purposes pull apart: the best evaluation finds the buy-out slowed Bogotá down and still left the city better off, by moving road access from richer drivers to middle-income ones. No Bogotá-specific study measures the second-car rebound that made Mexico City's scheme famous, and this entry does not assume one.
Evidence🔬 Peer-reviewed
Scale🏙️ City-wide
FundingSelf-financing since 2020: Pico y Placa Solidario permit fees go entirely to the Fondo de Estabilización Tarifaria, which subsidises Integrated Public Transport System fares.
Sources
↗ Secretaría Distrital de Movilidad — Pico y Placa (operator)Operator page. Legal basis for private vehicles is Decreto Distrital 003 of 6 January 2023 (with Decree 660/2001 for taxis, 248/2016 special transport, 840/2019 amended by 077/2020 for cargo). Hours and plate calendars live in monthly PDFs the page links rather than in the page text, so the 06:00-21:00 Monday-Friday schedule was taken from the city's own July 2026 calendar article instead.
↗ Alcaldía de Bogotá — pico y placa for private vehicles, 1-31 July 2026Currency check: the scheme is running in July 2026 on the odd/even calendar rule (plates ending 1-5 on odd-numbered days, 6-0 on even), Monday to Friday 06:00-21:00, with no restriction on Saturdays, Sundays or holidays for Bogotá-registered private cars.
↗ Alcaldía de Bogotá — what the photo-detection cameras detectThe scope-test source. Automatic cameras detect 'exceso de velocidad, pico y placa, falta de revisión técnico mecánica y cruces de semáforo en rojo'; semi-automatic ones at traffic lights also cover pico y placa. In both cases 'un agente de tránsito valida la información' before a citation is issued. No camera count or deployment dates on the page, so none is claimed here.
↗ Infobae, 13 May 2026 — Bogotá's most common traffic offences in 2025Carrying sentence for the enforcement figure, attributed to the Secretaría Distrital de Movilidad: 'Circular en horarios o zonas restringidas, especialmente referidas al pico y placa (C14), fue la causa de 72.339 multas' in 2025, an average of 198 a day, concentrated in Suba (19%), Ciudad Bolívar (11%) and Kennedy (9%). Press reporting of an official figure, not an audit.
↗ Pico y Placa Solidario — official permit platform (operator)The only authorised sales channel; the city warns publicly about imitation sites. Automated fetching returned little beyond the one-line description of the daily, monthly and six-month permits, so prices and the revenue rule were verified elsewhere.
↗ Alcaldía de Bogotá — where the Pico y Placa Solidario revenue is investedOfficial statement that '100% of this revenue is allocated to financing, strengthening and improving the quality of Bogotá's Integrated Public Transport System', and the four pricing factors: base price by duration, environmental factor by fuel and emissions, the vehicle's commercial value, and the municipality of registration. Carries no revenue totals or permit counts.
↗ Semana, 2026 — the collection mechanism that does not decongest the cityDates the instrument: created by Decreto 749 de 2019, operating from 22 September 2020. Source for the counterweight: the Secretaría says the objective is to discourage buying a second vehicle rather than to reduce congestion, the fund covers about 18% of the fare stabilisation fund in 2026, and GovLab's Ómar Oróstegui argues 'el pico y placa ya perdió el impacto con el que fue concebido' as the fleet grew from roughly 500,000 vehicles to over 2.5 million.
↗ El Tiempo — the numbers behind Pico y Placa SolidarioCarrying source for the revenue series (COP 6.1bn 2020, 25.7bn 2021, 218.3bn 2022, 412bn 2023, 423bn 2024, 488bn 2025; about 1.6 trillion cumulative), for the December 2025 peak of 446,853 daily permits, and for the sentence that around 30,000 vehicles circulate on permits each day, 3.5-4% of the capital's daily traffic. Figures sourced from the Secretaría de Movilidad; peso amounts are Colombian pesos.
↗ Montero, Sepúlveda & Basso, 'Pricing Congestion to Increase Traffic: The Case of Bogotá', Journal of the European Economic Association (accepted 2025)The load-bearing peer-reviewed evaluation, and it is about Bogotá specifically, not the genre. The OUP page returned only site navigation to automated fetching; the abstract, the roughly 9% fall in average speed, the US$222 million annual welfare gain and the US$759m/US$506m split between middle- and higher-income drivers were read from the authors' listing at chair-energy-prosperity.org (https://chair-energy-prosperity.org/en/research-area-2/politiques-sectorielles-transition-energetique-2/pricing-congestion-to-increase-traffic-the-case-of-bogota/). The working-paper PDF at economia.uc.cl would not decode in the review sandbox. The welfare figures are model estimates, not measured cash.
↗ El Nuevo Siglo — eleven changes to Bogotá's pico y placa in 24 yearsChronology: 1998 start under Peñalosa at 06:00-10:00 and 13:00-21:00 during TransMilenio phase one construction; 2002 Mockus rotation; 2009 Moreno extension to 14 hours; July 2012 Petro's odd-even at seven hours; 2020 pandemic suspension and September 2020 restart with the Solidario permit; January 2023 extension to 06:00-21:00. Press chronology, not an operator record; the widely repeated '240,000 vehicles' figure for 1998 is left out of this entry.
↗ El País (Colombia), 2023 — court declines to suspend the pico y placa decreeThe Tribunal Administrativo de Cundinamarca refused, on appeal, to suspend Decreto 003 of 6 January 2023 while claimants argued it breached the equality principle and rested on insufficient technical studies. The article does not discuss the paid exemption, so no ruling on Solidario is claimed.
↗ Alcaldía de Bogotá — Saturday pico y placa for vehicles registered outside the cityAnnounced 14 November 2025 by mayor Carlos Fernando Galán: from 2026 privately owned cars not registered in Bogotá face restriction two Saturdays a month, and the Solidario multiplier for out-of-city plates rises from 1.2 to 1.5 from January 2026, on the argument that around 30% of circulating vehicles pay no tax in the capital. The governor of Cundinamarca has publicly called the measure discriminatory and threatened to take it to the Tribunal Administrativo de Cundinamarca; as of this review no ruling was found.
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Pico y Placa: Plate Rationing You Can Pay to Escape” — Bogotá, Colombia. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/bogota-pico-y-placa/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.
