People you will never meet (2)

A long ---but hopefully illustrative--- post on bus synchronizers, the clocks of the chaotic Colombian transportation system.

Similarly as minute sellers, bus synchronizers are rather recent street characters. To better understand what they do and why they do it, it is convenient to know a bit better how public transportation works in Colombian cities.

The first thing you should know is that unlike most civilized cities, In Colombia public buses do not belong to the city or to the Colombian state. Here, private companies own a number of buses and little buses (called colectivos or busetas, no more than 20 seats). Each company is managed independently from each other and serves a number of routes. The sole role of the city is to provide licenses to the companies and to manage routes, designing and assigning them to companies.

Also unlike serious countries, when you take a bus or colectivo you pay in cash to the driver. So, yes, apart from driving the bus driver should be aware of the money and of the change (yes, you don't need to pay with the exact change). The fact that drivers have to deal with money directly changes everything, and is the main cause of one of the most chaotic events one has to experience as a citizen: the so-called war of the cent ("la guerra del centavo").

The war of the cent consists in the competition bus drivers have with each other in order to earn more money by picking up as many passengers as possible. This occurs because of a number of factors:

1. The concept of bus stop does not exist in Colombia. You can take and get off a bus wherever you want.
   
2. The bus drivers do not have a fix salary; their income depends on the number of passengers they pick up during the day. At the end of the day, a small part of the money they produce is for them, the rest goes to the owner of the bus (yes, buying and managing public buses is a great business in Colombia).
   
3. The same route is assigned to the several companies, so it could happen that, from a given place in the city, you have several options (that is, several companies) to choose from.
4. There is little control inside companies. Since there are no bus stops, location and velocity for each bus are highly variable. There are some controls inside the city, but these are insufficient.

With the above factors in mind, then it's probably easier to understand why the war of the cent is the fierce competition that takes place between two bus drivers in order to get passengers. Notice that this occurs mostly between drivers of the same company. As most things in life, this circumstance has pros and cons:

1. In the negative side, it could occur that even if there are buses available, they don't stop to pick you up because they're fighting to each other and picking you up would mean losing valuable advantage.
2. Also in the negative side, as drivers take the war very seriously, they rarely respect traffic lights and regulations. It could be very risky indeed: while I was in Cali, for instance, there was a serious accident: a colectivo crashed into a house, 2 died and 23 more were injured:
   
   
   
3. In the positive side, if you're waiting for a bus and then one of the competitors picks you up, because of the previous item, you have the guarantee that there's no faster way for arriving to your destination.
   
4. Also positive, although only from my perspective, being part of a bus competition could be very fun.
   

Now that you, my gentle reader, have a basic understanding of the way Colombian buses "work", let me introduce today's unique profession: the bus synchronizers.

As mentioned before, bus companies have only a few controls inside the city. Usually there is a central station at each side of the city. Inside the city, however, bus drivers have no information on how the other drivers of the same route are relatively placed. This occurs because, even if the central station could synchronize buses (e.g., by dispatching a bus each five minutes for each route), buses stop and pick passengers wherever they find them, thus quickly losing this initial synchronization.

This is where today's character comes into play: bus synchronizers are placed in strategic intersections in the city. Their only tools are a watch, a piece of paper and a pen: as soon as a bus of a given company passes through the intersection, the synchronizers record in the piece of paper the time and the number of the bus. This is half of the job. The other part consists in informing the passing driver about the location of the bus of the same route that has passed before him. As the bus passes, they could yell something as the following:

"You're 5 from the 2156, and he's 10 from the 4123"

which means that the bus passing is five minutes away from bus number 2156, and that the 2156 is 10 minutes away from bus number 4123. This way, drivers get a very precise idea of how the "passenger market" is functioning. For instance, by knowing that the time separation is more than 5 minutes, a driver could possibly decide to speed up, so to get closer, and pick up more passengers. Conversely, if the driver realizes he's very close to the previous bus (say 1 or 2 minutes) then he would probably slow down, as the previous bus must have gotten all the available passengers.

When a driver hears this information he usually throws a coin to the bus synchronizer, as a way of rewarding his service. This is not mandatory: bus synchronizers don't get upset if they don't receive money from a driver. They know that the day is long, and that their luck will arrive sooner than later: he (or she) will be able to gather enough coins to buy his lunch.

A synchronizer in action, in a busy street in Cali. He's approaching to deliver useful information to the driver of route number 3 of the "Recreativos" company. Ironically, just above the name "Recreativos" it reads the company motto: "Comfortable, Safe, and Efficient Transportation".
Thanks to my brother for the picture.

Sometimes there's more than a synchronizer in the same intersection; this is specially common in huge ones: only one synchronizer wouldn't be enough to serve a lot of routes at the same time. Bus drivers know where synchronizers are, and sometimes have a preferred one. Also, there are some ambitious bus synchronizers who offer an extra service: they provide drivers with coins. Indeed, since drivers need to give change back to passengers, and this change is usually coins, they can quickly run out of coins. Upon they payment of a small commission, a bus synchronizer can change your 2000 pesos banknote (0.81 euro) and give you coins for 1800 pesos (0.73 euro).

To conclude this installment devoted to bus synchronizers, it must be said that bus synchronizers have very diverse origins: you see old and young people, women and men, even small kids. You can easily tell they're very smart people. Perhaps their only knowledge in life is the notion of time and the numbers. Most likely, they have very difficult lives. I find it noble that, in very difficult circumstances, bus synchronizers have chosen to decrease the levels of chaos, rather than becoming thieves or drug addicts. What motivates most Colombians to take long, uncomfortable ---yet honest--- roads to survival will be always a mystery to me.

Next in this section: the parking assistants and the packing boys.