If you've been to Bogotá in the last seven years, you've probably noticed a city that is distinctly different from the metropolises of many other Latin American countries. It's cleaner, more efficient and easier to navigate. Not only that, many of the city's public spaces exist alongside, not in spite of, vehicle transit networks.

This is no accident. Bogotá's hugely successful Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system, the Transmilenio, has been the centerpiece of the city's urban regeneration. (Sidenote: I spent much of July/August 2006 traveling to Bogotá and other cities in Latin America, conducting independent research on urban transportation reform).

The Transmilenio system now attracts visits by city planners, engineers, development institutions, and politicians from the world over, all of whom come to learn about innovations in urban transportation. As many cities' privately operated, informal systems become increasingly inefficient, unsafe, and environmentally disastrous, Bogotá has been inundated with city planners looking for new answers.

It's not surprising, then, that Bogotá's BRT system was featured heavily in the annual "Transforming Transportation" Conference, hosted by WRI's EMBARQ program in Washington, DC last week. I had a great opportunity to listen in as experts from Bogotá gave updates on Transmilenio and discussed the continuing challenges that the system faces as it enters its eighth year of operation.

While participating in the conference, though, I was struck by the lack of discussion of Transmilenio as a BoP system. In fact, in all the discussion about Bogotá's successes and challenges, Transmilenio is rarely analyzed specifically in terms of its focus on and relevance to the BoP. According to Dario Hidalgo, a BRT and urban mobility expert who was deeply involved with the development of Bogotá's BRT system and who is now a member of the EMBARQ team, Transmilenio was intended to be a BoP solution from its inception.

For Enrique Peñalosa, the mayor of Bogotá who drove the initial planning and implementation of Transmilenio, making high quality transportation accessible to Bogotá's low-income population was central to the project. By attacking the public transportation crisis, characterized by "penny wars," gaps in service, unequal pricing, high levels of pollution, and serious traffic congestion, the new BRT system aimed to reduce inequality. This included not only disparities in the quality of transportation services, but also long-term economic and educational inequities perpetuated by a lack of mobility and access between high and low-income areas of the city.

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