Buenos Aires Subte: CBTC Resignalling & Control Centre
Argentina handed its 1913 metro to the city in 2012, and the city agency SBASE has since put Siemens Trainguard MT CBTC on three of six lines — H in 2016, C in 2020, D in 2024. It runs attended automatic train operation at GoA2: the driver stays in the cab and presses to depart, and no Subte line is driverless or certified to be. Two round-the-clock control rooms track train positions alongside traction power, ventilation and pumping, and SBASE publishes static GTFS plus a real-time feed that Google and Moovit consume. A city audit found the Line D programme finished one of three planned stages, five months late, reaching a 3-minute peak headway but not the promised 2:15 — there are not enough trains. Ridership has not recovered either: 199.1 million paid trips in 2024.
Line D reached a 3-minute peak headway after resignalling, but the promised 2 minutes 15 seconds could not be verified in practice for lack of rolling stock, and one of three planned stages was completed, five months late — findings of an Auditoría General de la Ciudad report on the Line D works, reported April 2026.
🎓 Lesson
Signalling sets the floor on headway; the fleet sets the actual service. Buenos Aires bought the capacity to run a train every 2:15 and still runs one every 3.
Evidence📊 Independent
Scale🏙️ City-wide
FundingCity of Buenos Aires capital works through SBASE
Sources
↗ Railway Gazette / Metro Report — Siemens to resignal Buenos Aires Line DThe load-bearing automation sentence: SBASE selected Siemens Mobility for CBTC on Line D, "with the CBTC supporting attended ATO to Grade of Automation 2". Also dates Trainguard MT on Line H to mid-2016 and its commissioning on Line C to February, and says it replaces an Alstom ATP in use since 2008, coordinated by a newly established operations control centre.
↗ enelSubte — Line C reopens operating with the new CBTC signallingTrade press describing what GoA2 means in the cab: the driver presses a button and the train accelerates automatically to the next stop, and "can take control of the formation's operation at any moment". Dates the Line C reopening to 3 February 2020, replacing signalling in service since 1934, and states the 2:15 headway target depends on buying more trains — the line then had 13.
↗ enelSubte — Lack of trains and signalling problems behind Line D's poor service (22 May 2024)Three months after the Line D cutover: Siemens was still updating software for line-specific behaviour, causing speed restrictions at platforms and station approaches; the Alstom 100 units — about a third of the fleet — could not run until calibration finished; journey times up 25%. "La línea funciona con menos trenes que antes."
↗ Nueva Ciudad — Line D: cost overruns, delays and failures in key works (15 April 2026)Carries the impact figures from an Auditoría General de la Ciudad report: the signalling project "contemplaba tres etapas, pero solo una se completó (con cinco meses de atraso)"; the completed phase enabled a 3-minute frequency while the promised 2:15 cannot be verified because "falta material rodante suficiente"; works advanced "sin un plan de trabajo aprobado para su etapa final". FETCH FAILURE, flagged: the AGCBA report PDF itself returned unreadable binary to automated fetching, so these audit findings are verified at press level, not against the primary document. The 48.11% cost increase and nine-month extension in the same audit belong to the Palermo and Scalabrini Ortiz station works, not to the signalling, and are deliberately excluded here.
↗ Buenos Aires city government — inside the Subte's monitoring centreOperator/authority description of the Puesto Central de Operaciones: two centres, one for lines A–E and one for line H, 26 staff, running "las 24 horas, los 365 días del año", monitoring train positions and signalling plus power, ventilation and pumping systems. No performance data is published from it — the entry claims none.
↗ Buenos Aires Data — Subte GTFS (published by SBASE)Static GTFS for the Subte, publisher Subterráneos de Buenos Aires (SBASE), licence CC-BY-2.5-AR. Checked 26 July 2026: the page carried the notice "Se informa a los usuarios de BA DATA que todos los datasets con Formato API y GTFS, están suspendidos. Se encuentran en revisión y corrección", with no date given.
↗ Buenos Aires Data — API Transporte Público (real-time feed)The real-time layer: for subte it provides static GTFS, forecastGTFS (trips currently running) and service alerts, licence CC-BY-2.5-AR, published by the Secretaría de Transporte y Obras Públicas; the portal states the API is used by Google and Moovit and is open to any developer on registration. Carries the same suspension notice as the GTFS dataset.
↗ Ley 4472 (2012) — regulation and restructuring of the SubteThe instrument transferring the network to the City of Buenos Aires and naming SBASE as the authority responsible for infrastructure, maintenance, development and the operating control systems, with the service run under concession. This is what clears the city-scope test for the entry.
↗ Página/12 — Metrovías stays in charge of the Subte for another 12 yearsConcession facts: Emova Movilidad, of the Benito Roggio Transporte group, took over operation and maintenance on 1 December 2021 under a 12-year contract running to 2033, succeeding Metrovías, which had held it since 1995.
↗ Observatorio del Derecho a la Ciudad — passengers and fares on the Buenos Aires Subte, 2015–2025 (21 June 2025)Independent NGO report, drawing on the Centro de Estudios Metropolitanos and official statistics: 199,116,074 passengers in 2024, and March 2025 at "apenas el 54% de los pasajeros de marzo de 2019". Two different 2019 annual totals circulate (about 325 and about 341 million) and neither is used here. FETCH FAILURE, flagged: the official Instituto de Estadística y Censos series at estadisticaciudad.gob.ar looped on a host redirect and could not be read to settle the 2019 figure.
↗ enelSubte — Chinese firm CRRC pre-awarded the new Line B trainsEstablishes the limit of the rollout: CBTC operates on lines C, D and H only, no installation has been announced for Line B, and the new Line B trains must suit the existing ATP while being "prepared for a possible conversion to CBTC with ATO in GoA2" — the city itself specifies GoA2 as the ceiling.
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Buenos Aires Subte: CBTC Resignalling & Control Centre” — Buenos Aires, Argentina. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/buenos-aires-subte-signalling/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.
