The traffic light turns red at the corner of Avenida Juárez and Eje Central, the busiest pedestrian crossing in Mexico City, used by around 9,000 people every hour. Tonight, a driver stops his grey Peugeot exactly on the crossing where the masses are trying to pass. His car is now a steel barrier for those trying to reach the Palacio de Bellas Artes. A masked man dressed in black makes his way through the river of people, walking purposefully towards the Peugeot. His black and white striped cape, reminiscent of a zebra crossing, flaps behind him. He goes to the car, flings his cape over his shoulder, and pushes the Peugeot backwards to make space.

“My name is Peatónito, and I fight for the rights of pedestrians,” he says, introducing himself. The driver smiles and reverses willingly and eventually the pair shake hands. With the pedestrian crossing again flowing as it should, Peatónito heads back to the pavement where he will wait until he is needed again. The traffic light turns green.

Since 2012, Mexico City has had a “superhero” defending its pedestrians: Peatónito, or Pedestrian Man. Three years after he first appeared on the streets, armed with a highway code and a white aerosol can to spray zebra crossings and pavements where none existed, Peatónito can take pride in the victories that he and his fellow transport rights activists have achieved. Together, they fight for a safer, more efficient way for people to get around the capital – which has 5.5m vehicles in circulation – on foot.

The triumphs are tangible. This August, Mexico City’s government presented a new set of road traffic regulations with reduced speed limits on primary routes (that is, slower routes) from 70km/h to 50km/h. The reduced speed limit isn’t a mere whim on the part of the activists; it’s possible to measure how dangerous the streets of the capital are. In Mexico City, 52 accidents in every 1,000 are fatal. In the entire country, the rate is 39 deaths for every 1,000 accidents.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Peatónito on duty at the Zócalo: ‘In Mexico City, just moving from A to B is the most hazardous and inefficient thing imaginable.’ Photograph: Sean Smith/The Guardian

Another battle that has been fought and won is the implementation of “Vision Zero”, a series of public policies aimed at eradicating road traffic deaths, which activists worldwide have been backing for years. Their aims: an ethical focus to ensure that human life is prioritised; shared responsibility between those who design the roads and those who use them, and street safety and mechanisms for change.



The Netherlands, Sweden and the UK are among the pioneering countries to adopt Vision Zero (the first two just under 20 years ago). Then came US cities like Chicago, New York, Boston, San Francisco, and eight more. In Mexico, the initiative has been taken up – at least as a point of discussion – in Torreón, an industrial city in the state of Coahuila, and in Mexico City.

If today pedestrians are at the centre of Mexico City’s new road traffic regulations – having relegated cars from the top of the agenda – it is in large part the result of years of activism influencing the city’s policies on road traffic safety.

The dangers of walking

But why does Mexico City need a superhero like Peatónito? And how did the country’s first group of pedestrian rights activists emerge in the capital? If you consider that Mexico City combines the biggest concentration of cars, inadequate road infrastructure, and a total lack of road safety culture, it is not surprising that there are more deaths on the city’s streets than on any others in Mexico.

According to the National Council for the Prevention of Accidents, in 2013, 491 pedestrians died in road traffic accidents in Mexico City. This is equivalent to 6% of all the pedestrian deaths recorded that year in the country. In contrast, when we look at the number of fatalities among drivers and vehicle passengers, the figure is cut by half. Only 265 of those killed in road traffic accidents in 2013 were behind the wheel or in the car at the time. Being a pedestrian in the world’s fourth most populous city is to risk one’s neck on a daily occurrence.



Despite the fact that in Mexico City, just three out of every 10 journeys are made by car, for decades the government has favoured investment in public works that favour car usage. Walking around the city may well be for the adventurous types, statistically speaking, but Mexico City is full of people who make their journeys on two feet: navigating cars, running after buses that don’t stop where they should, risking their lives on the public bicycle system. Looking after all these people are the traffic police, but there is little they can do in a city of feverish drivers who will do anything to arrive at their destination on time.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest The man behind the mask is Jorge Cáñez, a 29-year-old political scientist. Photograph: Sean Smith/The Guardian

Convincing Mexico’s inhabitants to use their cars less would not only reduce the number of traffic accidents, but would improve the functionality of the city by cutting, for example, the time it takes to commute across the metropolitan zone. Daily transport services in the form of ramshackle buses, driven recklessly, head to the centre crammed with passengers from the suburbs. The underground system, the Metro, has not been properly serviced in years and is also packed to dangerous extremes each morning.

Mexico City, like other cities in the world, doesn’t boast services such as “park and ride” or “incentive parking” – those car parks that allow commuters heading for city centres to leave their vehicles and transfer to public transport connections for part of the journey.



With a general outlook like this, it is little wonder that people opt to use their cars each day to get around, despite it taking up to two or three hours for them to reach their destination.

It’s for all these reasons that Peatónito swoops down onto the streets of Mexico City, backed by a network of activists intent on putting a stop to such problems and making the city more civilised and habitable.

Peatónito unmasked

The man behind Peatónito’s mask is Jorge Cáñez, a 29-old political scientist who works in a civic technology lab for the city government. Twice a week, he dresses as a superhero and takes to the streets to expose serious and minor traffic violations.

“In Mexico City, just moving from A to B is the most hazardous, complicated and inefficient thing imaginable,” says Peatónito, in a bar in the Roma district, one of the city’s most pedestrian-friendly areas, where cyclists and motorcyclists can move around in relative safety. He recalls how his activism began when he had to endure the daily torment of travelling by bus from his house to university.

“When I was a student, I told myself: ‘I’m not going to rest until I find out the reason why public transport from my house to university is so bad, and until I find a solution’.” Thus, 10 years ago, Cáñez began investigating how Mexico City’s public transportation policies are conceived. What he didn’t know was that he wasn’t alone.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The arrival of the Metrobús in 2010 was a turning point for the city’s transportation agenda. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

In 2010, with the arrival in of the Metrobús, Mexico City’s first bus system in the style of busway or BRT (Bus rapid transit), the agenda around transportation began to be more visible. And yet, groups of urban cyclists had already spent more than 20 years trying to highlight the importance of developing a city that is more amenable to different modes of transport. In 2010, the collective “Walk, Build a City”, the first group of pedestrian rights activists in the country, began to make themselves known.



That year, on 21 March, members of the collective painted a pavement on a controversial highway that was built without the normal public bidding process and which damaged green areas.It seemed no one felt it important that the pedestrians should have a designated path, despite the fact they were forced to use that space if they wanted to take the bus.



It took those citizens longer to paint the pavement than for the government to remove it. “We promise to paint a better one,” officials said. And although it took some time, in the end they did designate a narrow strip along the bridge to pedestrians. It was the first of many victories for the pro-mobility activists.



‘The road can be a ring’

Was it necessary to create a character that resembled something out of a Lucha Libre fight to raise awareness about the risks to Mexico City’s pedestrians? Jorge Peatónito isn’t sure, but he believes creativity is a powerful weapon for activists.

“Lucha Libre is deep-rooted in Mexican life, but the idea [for Peatónito] came to me the day I took a few foreign friends along to see a fight. If we’ve had Superbarrio (another Mexican self-claimed superhero who fought causes on behalf of the city’s lower classes in the 1990s), why can’t we imagine the street as a wrestling ring?” This is how his activism acquired its comedy touch.

Humour aside, Peatónito is well aware that in real life superpowers don’t exist, and was himself involved in a car crash four months ago, when a car rammed his bicycle near the Tepito neighbourhood, an area of the city that is notorious for its gangs and black market. Fortunately, he was unhurt – traffic chaos is his kryptonite, he says.

Notwithstanding the risks of the job, Cáñez finds it rewarding and has no plans to abandon his superhero persona: “I do it all for the love of art, to do something for the city. Financially speaking, Peatónito hasn’t earned me more than the fee for a few talks and a couple of trips. That’s it. The best thing is the satisfaction of communicating a message in a powerful way.”

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Activists like Peatónito barely have time to celebrate a victory before setting their eyes on the next goal. For 2016, this is the “budget for comprehensive transport”.

“We’ve won the discussion. We’ve won over the law … now, we need to win in terms of a budget. That’s why we’ve launched a campaign called Fight for the Civilised City, which is inspired by Lucha Libre. We’ve been out on our bikes wearing masks demanding that resources be allocated to non-motorised transport projects.”

In the 2016 national budget, just 7% of the 50,000m pesos (£1,900m) designated to transportation will go to projects related to pedestrians or bicycles. The activists’ job as they see it is to get this changed in Congress before November, when the current proposal for the distribution of the funds will be approved.

To achieve this goal, their first step is to try to meet the secretary of finance and public credit, Luis Videgaray. If they are successful, they will have already won part of the battle. With a little rhyme, Peatónito resumes his battle cry: “More loot so they go on foot.”



Translated by Sophie Hughes

