Right now, were I in my hometown of London and still commuting, I would be furious, spitting blood and most probably screaming obscenities at the striking tube workers. It is after all a national pastime to complain about such things. We are obsessed with it. If we cannot whinge about public transport, then we bitch about the weather and if not that football, work, house prices and other mundane topics.

I have not read up on what they are striking about this time, but I do know that this 72 hour halt to services on the majority of London’s underground lines is set to be repeated in a week. I feel for my commuting friends there who are going to be stuck in overcrowded buses in gridlock as they try and negotiate their way home today and to work tomorrow in the mayhem.

I left London again in 2004 and one of the core reasons for quitting my job with a good NGO was principally the issues I had on a daily basis with the transport system. Unreliable, expensive and under-funded are three polite terms that I would call it. For almost two years I cycled roughly 5km from my home to a train station to catch a 40 minute commute south. I remember vividly that not once in this time did the train ever leave or arrive on time.

So now I find myself here after various adventures, in Bogota, and I have brought some of my grievances with me unfortunately. At times I feel ready to criticise the transport system here in this country, but then I think of the price of travel, minimal, the amount of buses, thousands. Of course there is room for improvement, and the political powers that be know this too.

In October the whole country will be voting on a local level for mayors and councillors. The debate the other day between several mayoral hopefuls for Bogota revolved pretty much around one issue, transport.

At present Bogota – a city I love - is choking to death on fumes and incidents of children born with respiratory problems is on the increase. Diesel belching buses that are quite simply not roadworthy spew black clouds of muck along the major city thoroughfares and in turn the buildings lining these routes are permanently covered and stained with grungy black soot.  In the debate, this issue was barely addressed, talk was all about how to increase capacities for Bogotá’s commuters and who would do what for the city’s Transmilenio bendy bus/ tram system.

I don’t claim to have the answers, but wish for the issues to be at the very lest addressed. The Transmilenio system was a good idea, although no one thought to design a new transport link in a green environmentally friendly fashion! This runs on diesel as well and billows out unpleasant fumes as well. What were they thinking?

However, it does not suffer from traffic jams since it has its own blocked off lane, but the system itself can only have been designed by a 40 member committee. The maps are unintelligible, they don’t even have maps in the buses themselves, the routes are poorly posted and there are too few running the key routes leading locals to dub the system as the Trans-mi-lleno, referring to the fact that at peak hours it is impossible to breathe due to overcrowding.

In the Transmilenio’s defence, it has cleaned up the Avenida Caracas and it is safe and one is not continually harassed by people pleading money.

Which leads me to the buses.

A few months ago I was on a bus running through a less than salubrious district of town. It was not my intention to be here yet, where I was going lay on the other side, so the journey made sense. Two young men or boys jumped aboard the open door, one keeping the door jammed open lest the driver spotted what was happening, and the other moved swiftly five rows down, withdrew a knife and held it to a young lady’s eye. “If anyone moves, I’ll cut her eye,” he yelled. No one moved. He demanded her mobile phone – I saw it, a business as usual Nokia brick – and with that he was gone. The whole thing was over in seconds. The two sixteen year olds fled running down 13th.

Security on buses is poor. Getting on a more modern bus will increase your chances of a safe ride. You can guarantee on someone or other clambering on to try and sell you nail files or sewing needles, you get the occasional displaced person due to the conflict, and fine, for the most part we give a few pennies or whatever we have. Yesterday a guy clambered on, scarred and drunk saying he hadn’t enough for the bus fare and a kindly passenger gave him what he needed and then he just got off the bus, earnings in hand.

There is a move in the Bogota government to try and confiscate and wreck all crappy buses out there, but the department in charge of this moves incredibly slowly, powered by corruption and fear of the Unions. There are apparently three families who own all the city’s buses and they club together whenever there’s a threat to their massive wealth. The strike, when it happens, is incredible. The city is paralysed.

When all is said and done, I thank my luck that I am in Bogota and not London and that, for the most part, I work from home.