CBS News, 2/9/12
After two hours’ grueling drive southeast from the center of Mexico City, through paralyzing traffic jams and clouds of throat-burning smog, the bleached-white haze of air pollution gives way to pale-blue sky. In a flat-bottomed boat tied to a willow tree, Crispin Matteos Galicia hauls up sediment in a plastic bucket to fertilize squash seedlings for his chinampa, an island farm built in the shallow waters flowing from the Lake of the Aztec Kings.
It’s a routine that’s played out for hundreds of years in the waters that used to cover the Valley of Mexico. But just over the treeline, the future is coming. Inside a freshly built train yard about a mile to the north, a massive crane lifts a gleaming orange train car from a flatbed truck bed and lowers it onto the tracks of the city’s new subway line, a $1.7-billion project running 15 miles from the semi-rural borough of Tlahuac into the southwestern part of fully urbanized Mexico City.
The 20-station Line 12, or Golden Line, is expected to open this summer and carry some 437,000 passengers a day across the southern part of Mexico City, halving a commute that added up to more than four hours a day by bus or car for many people living in and around Tlahuac.
