Cable car commute in La Paz, Bolivia

In 2014, the first cable car line opened. It was the red line.

Soon a yellow line and a green line opened too. Each little cabin holds 10 people.

The state company Mi Teleférico opened its first cable car, the Línea Roja (red line), on 30 May 2014. It ran 2.3 kilometers from 16 de Julio to Central, climbing 400 meters, and the trip took about 11 minutes.

The Línea Amarilla (yellow line) followed on 15 September 2014. At about 3.7 kilometers it climbed 665 meters to Parque Mirador, 4,075 meters above sea level. The Línea Verde (green line) opened on 4 December 2014. Each cabin carried up to 10 passengers, and each line could move up to 3,000 people an hour in each direction.

Doppelmayr's 2015 project report gives the first three detachable gondola lines, built for the state operator Empresa Estatal de Transporte por Cable "Mi Teleférico": Línea Roja, opened 30 May 2014, 16 de Julio to Central, 2,349 m, 10.77-minute trip, 400 m vertical rise, three stations, 109 cabins; Línea Amarilla, 15 September 2014, Parque Mirador (4,075 m) to Libertador, 3,737 m, 16.84 minutes, 665 m rise, 169 cabins; Línea Verde, 4 December 2014, Libertador to Irpavi in the Zona Sur, 3,706 m, 16.63 minutes, 128 m rise, 165 cabins.

Together: about 10 km, 11 stations, 443 ten-passenger cabins, 3,000 passengers per hour per direction per line, speeds up to 5 m/s, 17 operating hours a day (5:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m.). The red line averaged 36,000 riders a day in its first three months. Doppelmayr Bolivia's chief executive said a red-line trip took just under eleven minutes, against up to an hour or more by car.

After that, more lines were built.

Now there are lines in many colors: red, yellow, green, blue, purple, silver and more. You can change from one line to another.

The network kept growing. The last line in La Paz and El Alto, the Línea Plateada (silver line), opened in March 2019. By 2025, Mi Teleférico ran 10 colored lines in the two cities, about 33 kilometers in all: Morada (purple), Amarilla (yellow), Azul (blue), Roja (red), Plateada (silver), Naranja (orange), Verde (green), Blanca (white), Celeste (sky blue) and Café (brown).

The company also runs one more line, in the city of Oruro. In 2025, a standard trip cost 3 bolivianos, with lower fares of 1.50 and 1 boliviano for some riders.

In September 2025 Cadena 3, reporting a statement by Mi Teleférico's executive manager, Alejandro Gonzales, described the network as 10 colored lines totaling 33 km, in service since May 2014, with the Plateada (March 2019) the last; La Razón's report on the company's February 2025 accountability hearing lists the ten La Paz-El Alto lines (Morada, Amarilla, Azul, Roja, Plateada, Naranja, Verde, Blanca, Celeste and Café) plus a tourist line in Oruro, eleven in all.

In the same September 2025 report Gonzales gave the standard fare as 3 bolivianos, with preferential fares of 1.50 and 1 boliviano. Doppelmayr's 2015 report shows the scale of the starting system for comparison: about 10 km and 11 stations on three lines, so the network grew to roughly three times its 2014 length.

Lots and lots of people ride the cable cars.

In 2024, there were more than 78 million rides! The purple line was the busiest.

The cable cars have become an everyday way to travel. In 2024, Mi Teleférico carried 78.7 million passengers, up from about 41 million in 2020. The busiest line was the Línea Morada (purple), with about 21.1 million passengers, followed by the yellow line. The least used line in La Paz was the Café (brown), with about 376,000.

On 15 July 2024, the blue line set a one-day record of 78,528 riders. By September 2025, the company said the network had carried more than 640 million passengers since 2014.

At its accountability hearing in February 2025, Mi Teleférico reported 78,715,401 passengers in 2024 on its La Paz and Oruro lines, after about 41 million (2020), 54 million (2021), 67 million (2022) and 73 million (2023), with fare revenue of Bs 220 million in 2024. The Morada carried 21,126,549 and the Amarilla 12,353,813, with the Azul and Roja next; the Café was the least used in La Paz, at 376,352. Daily records in 2024 were set by the Azul (78,528 on 15 July) and the Plateada (50,662 on 1 August). Cumulative ridership reached 587,871,246 by 31 December 2024 and, by the company's September 2025 statement, more than 640 million.

These are the operator's own figures; an independent audit was not found for this topic.

Before the cable cars, many trips meant sitting in slow traffic.

Now some people float over the traffic instead. Scientists found that cable car trips were often quicker.

Does riding in the air save time? Researchers studied commuters in La Paz and El Alto using a survey of how people traveled. They found that trips using the cable cars were about 22 percent shorter than trips by other kinds of transport, saving about nine minutes a day.

The study was published in 2019. It found that cable car trips were quicker whether the commute was short or long.

Grégoire Garsous, Ancor Suárez-Alemán and Tomás Serebrisky (Transport Policy, 2019) used a mobility survey to compare cable-car commutes with commutes by other modes in La Paz-El Alto. They estimated that the cable car cut commuting times by an average of 22 percent, about nine minutes a day, with an average net benefit of US$0.58 per commute, and that the advantage held for short and long commutes alike. Their abstract describes the network as the longest urban cable car system in the world at the time.

The abstract does not say when the survey was taken. Doppelmayr's 2015 report adds that the whole area had suffered from huge traffic congestion, and quotes Javier Tellería, chief executive of Doppelmayr Bolivia, calling ropeways not only the most efficient but also the most cost-effective option; that is the builder's account.