Dear Headway reader,

Recently, I traveled to Bogotá, Colombia, which is twice the size of New York, to report on a transit system that was once the envy of cities around the world. The system, a rapid bus network called TransMilenio, rolled out in 2000. Its buses weren’t as big or as fast as trains, but they were up and running in a fraction of the time and at a vastly lower cost. Millions of residents living in far-flung, formerly disconnected slums suddenly gained access to jobs and schools.

The idea of rapid buses became the rage from Jakarta to Mexico City, and Enrique Peñalosa, the Bogotá mayor who cooked up the idea for TransMilenio, became a globe-trotting celebrity after his term ended. Grist Magazine even compared him to George Harrison and the Dalai Lama.

Peñalosa is an outsized figure — literally; he is N.B.A. tall — with a gift for hogging the spotlight. But there was another colorful character whose contributions to TransMilenio I had to leave on the cutting room floor.

Super Citizen

Antanas Mockus served as mayor both before and after Peñalosa. A philosopher and mathematician by training, he first won election in a landslide, after being ousted as president of Colombia’s National University for mooning an auditorium full of booing student protesters. (He explained the dropping of his pants by citing the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “symbolic violence.”)

In office, he showered on national television and wandered Bogotá’s streets in a Spandex outfit, calling himself Super Citizen.

His antics were serious — and highly effective. TransMilenio would never have gotten far without him. He took over a city whose murder rate was among the worst in the world, more than seven times as high as New York’s at its peak. Bogotá’s streets were unsafe, congested and chaotic. As a Times colleague reported back then, traffic signals were regarded by drivers as “optional,” disputes resolved “with machetes, guns and grenades.”