“You can’t use traditional cost-benefit analysis,” he said. “So long as the poor are given access and feel included in the city, that’s what matters.”

In Ecatepec, the Mexicable project has brought a smattering of urban progress, residents said. The municipal government has installed new streetlamps and paved some roads.

Along the route, the government has painted facades bright pink, green and mauve, and commissioned about 50 huge murals: a gaping shark’s mouth on one rooftop; a portrait of Frida Kahlo by the New York graffiti artist Alec Monopoly; an Elmer-like elephant sculpted by the Oaxacan artist Fernando Andriacci; a smiling girl whose face wraps around one of the concrete Mexicable stations.

But residents were skeptical that efforts at beautification would bring the kind of renaissance that Medellín has seen.

Nelli Huerta, a homemaker who was waiting for a bus in Tablas del Pozo, about halfway up the Mexicable route, with her 10-year-old daughter, said she had used the cable car a few times but preferred to travel on terra firma. Looking up as the dangling pods passed overhead, she said the government should have spent the money on basic services instead.

“How many people in San Andres have no water? No electricity? No paved roads?” she said. The murals that line the Mexicable route are “pretty,” she said, as are the newly painted houses. But, she added, “They’re just disguising the problem.”