Mexico City’s pollution troubles are well known. The city’s 22 million people live inside an immense valley that holds noxious waste just like a pressure cooker. The main source of this environmental chaos is the four million cars that clog the city’s roads day in and day out. The sorry state of our public transportation doesn’t help much, either. It is not uncommon to find people whose daily journey to work takes up to three or four hours and involves every mode of transportation known to man: from suburban trains to subways, large buses to smaller vans, all in a morning’s commute. The city’s subway system is capable but insufficient: vast areas of town -- and its sprawling suburbs -- are not covered by the network.

One would think that, in a city this size, the government would focus almost obsessively on the development of public transportation. Unfortunately, Mexico City has become a fashionable stepping stone towards the country’s presidency, thus encouraging its governor to develop fancy, visible infrastructure that might earn votes and populist cheers but do nothing to solve the city’s troubles. Such was the case of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador’s, former governor and then presidential candidate, who built a gargantuan "second floor" of the Periferico, the city’s main urban highway, that cost at least six hundred million dollars -- and four years of indescribable headaches -- to erect.

As in any major city, the only way to get people to stop driving here is to give them other viable options. While the city’s governors -- be they left or right, conservative or liberal -- continue to use the place as a political launching pad, precious little will be done to fix the gridlock that will have me, in around 15 more minutes, nursing my daily back pain while moving ever so slowly in traffic.