>>1212582Ironically, Mexico City's clunky BRT, the Metrobus, which has been hailed by many laymen as a great improvement, has actually been a massive rip-off. One Metrobus line costs over 1.2bn pesos a uear, including vehicle cost divided by useful life, while the budget for the STE is just 1.4bn pesos a year for 8 trolleybus lines and one LRT.
OTOH the surprisingly good quality of the corredor cero emisiones lines, also thanks to the trolleys amazing acceleration which makes them agile in city traffic (and makes for a fun ride), is nothing short of a miracle,considering what they have to work with. Trolleybuses are really well suited for mexico city as long as they just get a physically separated bus lane.
Fun fact, many lines run both ways on "ejes viales" a sort of fast, one-way thoroughfare introduced in the 70, so they have a counterflow bus lane. When the ejes viales were created they were conceived to have this type of trolley setup, since many of those roads were converted from avenues where previously trams had run. The standard road signs on those thoroughfares by design feature wire support for trolley catenary.
The 70s-80s were the heyday of trolleybuses:
>In 1989 it was operating about 700 trolleybuses on 30 lines with a route length of 557 km. It was the largest trolleybus system in Latin America 