Buenos Aires Catching the Collectivo

Monedas.  Some may say your days in Buenos Aires are characterized by a struggle to find coins.  Yes, that’s right—coins, monedas, something that in the US piles up in our pockets and the bottoms of our purses and on the floors of our cars.  We don’t really count it as money.  I for one think I got something for free if I paid with coins in the US.  But no, in Buenos Aires, they are indeed a precious metal. 

The collectivo is the bus system in Argentina’s capital.  In a city with 14 million people and nearly as many neighborhoods, the collectivo is shall we say, crucial.  However, although its name may suggest otherwise, it is a privatized bus system.  Yes yes, freedom to choose and all of that, but let’s put it this way: there are literally hundreds of bus lines in the city, different companies pulling the strings on different lines, each company with its own idea of a good route.  And each route was unimaginably completely undocumented until the arrival of the GUIA. 

Ten years ago, the GUIA was born, ingeniously invented to document each collectivo route into one guide.  Landing in Buenos Aires and deciphering the collectivos without a GUIA would be virtually impossible if one so choose to also pursue other activities.  This guide lists all of the streets within the city limits of Buenos Aires, from Acassuso to Zuviria, in the first pages of the booklet.  Proceeding the listed avenues comes a map of the city, spread out piece by piece over 36 pages.  Each page, or 1/36th of the entire city map, is further broken down into 24 squares.  Each square is accompanied by a list of buses that frequent that area, which is 5 city blocks.  However the collectivo list does not tell you the exact stopping point of the bus.  Therefore, to find a certain bus, you must walk that square area of 5 blocks, and hope to find a marked spot, or perhaps a queue of public transportation veterans waiting with resigned helplessness at an unmarked but somehow designated point. 

To make things just a little bit more adventurous, the routes are subject to change at any time the various owners of the collectivo lines so choose.  Therefore, the bus that the GUIA points to for your destination square may have changed its route, may have voted your square off the island.  But, the best you can do is hope that doesn’t happen, and wait for it to come.  The good news is that because bus drivers see traffic lanes as suggestions, there’s really no way you could miss a passing bus, as it is usually the only automobile in three lanes. 

Okay, so imagine that you have miraculously found the stop, and the route has not changed, and the bus has arrived.  You hop on as the doors fly open and the bus driver removes his foot from the gas for a generous 20 seconds.  You tell the driver “noventa”, because unless you are going outside of Buenos Aires, it only costs 90 centavos to go anywhere within the city.  The bus driver starts the meter, and you drop your coins in.  And here is where we go back to the aforementioned issue of monedas.

In an act of saving grace, the city of Buenos Aires has decreed that all bus rides within the city are 90 centavos, as I said before.  The buses do not accept bills, only coins.  And there is a coin shortage, to say the least, within the Capital Federal.  When I say there is a coin shortage, I can not adequately convey the off-kilter supply and demand balance without examples.  Take, for instance, a trip to the grocery store.  I gather my groceries into a basket and head to check out.  The cashier tells me the total is $20.80.  I hand her $22.00.  She looks at the money with such a look of disapproval that she barely stops short of wagging her forefinger at me.  “Do you have 80 cents?” she asks me.  Do I have 80 cents?  Just luxuriously jingling in my pocket?  And would I willingly hand it over to a grocery store? ”No,” I say without apologies.  This is getting ridiculous.  I see in the till that there are only a few coins, but enough to give me my 20 cents change.  Let’s just think about that for a second.  She asks me for 80 cents, when she only owes me 20.  Where is the logic?  Just as I am once again asking where the hell are all the monedas, the tiller opens up a locked drawer underneath her register, and I see the sparkling, rolling hills of hundreds of coins.  She sourly hands me two 10 cent pieces, as if parting with these coins is a major infringement on her day.  On my way back home from the grocery store, I take note of the dozens of kiosk and shop store window-fronts that warn customers that they “have no monedas.”  Don’t even try it, they seem to say.

For this shortage, there are various rumors.  One of my favorite explanations is that apparently, the metal that composes the coins is actually more valuable than the monetary value of the coin itself.  Therefore, some shrewd swindlers stash away these coins, melt them down, and sell the metal on the black market.  Perhaps an even more ridiculous, but no less accepted, rumor is that the Chinese mafia—yes, specifically the Chinese mafia—hoards the monedas until there are desperate shortages, at which point the Asian gangsters sell the coins for a hefty profit.  I’m pretty sure that’s the real reason. 

So, as if finding the appropriate bus is not hard enough, the Chinese mafia has now made paying for the bus an equal struggle.  In a city that never sleeps with a subway system that closes at 10 pm, you do what you can to get to a bus, and you do what you have to to pay for it.  When I walk down the street, I can spot the glint of the sun against a dropped coin from yards away.  And I will knock people over to be the first to reach that fallen treasure.  Precious metals and unpredictable routes.  A day in BsAs.  The upside of all this is that taking the bus now is really the only thing I need to do to feel as though I have led an accomplished day.