📋 Tender Overview
IDB credit
First step towards the transformation of metropolitan public transport
12/01/2025
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The Ministry of Transportation and Public Works (MTOP) began the first stage of the plan to modernize the public transportation system in the metropolitan area, after receiving the first 10 million dollars of a line of credit from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) that amounts to 500 million.
Minister Lucía Etcheverry stressed that the Government's central objective is to improve the efficiency, quality and reliability of the service during this five-year period. Citizens need answers and recover “quality, reliable and safe public transportation,” he indicated.
The first 10 million granted by the IDB will be allocated to pre-investment studies, necessary to prepare the projects and put out to tender the works. According to the agency, this stage will allow processes to be optimized, contractual risks to be reduced and efficient and sustainable execution to be ensured.
The studies will cover the traffic light network, simulations of private traffic, analysis of public transport frequencies in different areas, and the evaluation of travel times by day, hour and department. With this information, the bidding documents will be prepared, a process that will be carried out by the IDB itself.
The IDB document details that the transformation of Uruguay's metropolitan transportation includes the implementation of a high-capacity electric bus rapid transit (BRT) system, which will operate in two trunk corridors: on 8 de Octubre Avenue and Italia Avenue.
The project includes stations, exclusive segregated lanes, overpasses at main intersections, an underground section on 18 de Julio Avenue and an interchange terminal in Tres Cruces, which will function as a connection point between both corridors.
Etcheverry valued the joint work of the municipalities of Montevideo, Canelones and San José, in order to advance this project that is in the preparation stage to reduce travel times and improve the quality of metropolitan transportation. This requires studies “from an engineering point of view, traffic simulation, travel times, finding the trunk axes, where the largest number of public transportation users converge, what the needs of these departments are,” he explained.
A transformation of this scale requires, in addition to the support of the IDB, the financial support of the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean (CAF) and the World Bank, currently in the approval process, reported the leader.
Tags
Transportation Passenger transportation Interdepartmental transportation Metropolitan transportation Road transportation Suburban transportation
