February 9, 2026
Send in the clowns?
The Traffic Mimes of Bogotá
Mimes vs Gridlock: locals say 'never saw one', ad-rage erupts, climate nitpicks fly
TLDR: Bogotá once swapped 1,800 traffic cops for 20 mimes to shame bad drivers and became a legend of “citizen culture.” The comments? Climate nitpicks, fury at the site’s ads, U.S. liability jokes, and a local insisting they never saw a mime—proof the myth outlived the rollout.
Bogotá’s most chaotic commute once met its quiet match: mimes. In the 1990s, mayor Antanas Mockus fired 1,800 traffic cops and hired 20 striped performers (later 420) to shame red-light runners and applaud good behavior—“send in the clowns” as public policy. It became a cultural legend, part of cultura ciudadana (“citizen culture”), using theater instead of force to cut crashes and teach manners. But the comments? They turned the volume way up.
One reader pounced on the phrasing, fact-checking the “blistering sun” because Bogotá’s high-altitude weather is famously mild—cue the climate pedant wars. Another hijacked the thread with a full-blown site meltdown, raging that the Atlas Obscura page is “literally impossible to finish reading” on mobile. A local dropped the hottest take of all: after a lifetime in Bogotá, they’ve never seen a single mime—which tracks with the article’s fine print that the troupe only covered a few intersections. Meanwhile, a Medellín anecdote about a tightrope juggler sparked a mini–culture clash: in the U.S., “you’d be arrested,” and someone immediately asked, “how does insurance even work?” For proof of the spectacle, another commenter tossed in a video link. Verdict: the mimes taught traffic etiquette, but the comments taught us the internet never whispers—it only mimics, loudly.
Key Points
- •Antanas Mockus introduced traffic mimes in Bogotá in the mid-1990s to improve road safety through cultural and behavioral interventions.
- •The program replaced traditional enforcement by initially firing 1,800 traffic police and hiring 20 mimes who signaled “correct” and “incorrect” behavior.
- •The mime troupe expanded to 420 performers but operated only in select intersections across two neighborhoods.
- •The initiative aimed to address approximately 1,500 annual traffic-related deaths by leveraging public approval and social norms.
- •Though it ended before the late 1990s, media coverage and word of mouth cemented the mimes as a symbol of Mockus’s broader “cultura ciudadana” policy.