Thread: Traffic enough to drive you crazy

Traffic enough to drive you crazy


Mexico City motorists fight a fierce battle with gridlock



By Hector Tobar
Los Angeles Times

April 24, 2007



MEXICO CITY · Two or three mornings a week, I get the day started with a shot of adrenaline and vehicular aggression coursing through my veins.

Who needs caffeine when you have vintage Volkswagens coming at you the wrong way?

Cement trucks running red lights, unlicensed bus drivers and traffic circles where a Darwinian, survival-of-the-rudest logic prevails: I fight them all just to get my daughter to preschool, a harrowing drive of 1.3 miles.

Last year, more new cars were sold in Mexico than ever before: 1.2 million. In Mexico City, my minivan is one of about 6 million cars, taxis, buses and other vehicles, carrying 29 million people, that hit the streets every day.

The city traffic grid, first laid out by the Aztecs, is a patched-together series of compromises with Mexico City's tumultuous history. By every measure, traffic is worse here than it's ever been, despite the heroic efforts of a small cadre of traffic engineers who struggle to keep things moving.

Traffic is so bad, and driver behavior so out of control, that city officials are considering reinstating driving tests. Draconian fines soon will be implemented against everyday sins such as going the wrong way on a one-way street.

It's the huge numbers and the lack of space that force everyone who drives here to routinely be a jerk -- this scribe no exception. My fellow drivers and I double-park, we cut each other off, we make right turns from the left lane.

The locals rarely complain. There is no phrase in Mexican Spanish equivalent to "road rage."

Slowly, I'm learning how to drive like a chilango -- that's what residents of Mexico City call themselves.

To drive in this city you must be at once aggressive and patient. You ease your car into the next lane and force other drivers to let you in, because otherwise you'll never get where you're going. When someone cuts you off, you just let it go.

You must learn to surrender yourself to the traffic gods, who are, on most days, exceedingly angry with us poor sinners down here in the Valley of Mexico.

Alfredo Hernandez Garcia is the man in charge of preventing carros atrapados, or trapped cars. He works in a bunkerlike office in an otherwise nondescript building of the Public Security Secretariat, Mexico City's police force.

A graduate of the country's only university program in traffic engineering, he is a man uniquely prepared for a job best described as mitigating failure.

"It gets complex, very complicated," he says. It's a word he uses a lot to describe the traffic: "complicado."

As he talks, he looks distractedly at a live screen image transmitted by one of 300 cameras trained on traffic. This one shows his biggest headache, the "Periferico," or Peripheral Freeway, which circles the city, although it long ago was encircled by more city. At 1:42 p.m., four hours before rush hour, traffic on the Peri has come to a halt.

"It's totally paralyzed," I observe, pointing at the screen. "Those cars are trapped."

"Yes," he says with a frown. He gets on the phone and a short while later tells me, "A truck got stuck. We've sent a tow truck to clear it."

It isn't just broken-down cars that make the traffic complicado, he says. People deliberately try to tangle things up. Several times a month one protest or another blocks a key artery, upsetting the delicate balance that keeps traffic bearable but still bad.

City traffic cops issue 6,000 citations per day. More than half are for double-parking.

People park on the sidewalks, Hernandez Garcia says, which forces pedestrians to walk in traffic.

Even though the city's notoriously slow traffic mitigates the danger, on average 1,500 drivers and pedestrians are killed in accidents in Mexico City each year.

Once, driving tests were required, but they were scrapped because so many people paid bribes to get their licenses. Now the city is drawing up proposals to reinstate the tests.

Sergio Anibal Martinez, the newly appointed director of traffic planning for Mexico City, has plans to make traffic flow better. None involves more roads.

"We don't intend to make our city like Houston, Dallas or Los Angeles, a city filled with freeways," Martinez says.

I guide my car over five speed bumps and past two traffic signals on the way to my daughter's preschool.

There are a few stop signs, too, but everyone rolls past them.

The other day I stopped at one. Old habits die hard.

Honk! Honk! Honk! I looked in my rear-view mirror at a growing line of cars behind me. Go! Go! Just go! their horns shouted.

But I can't, I pantomimed back. Look, it's a red octagon, the universal symbol for stop.

Honk! Honk! Honk!

So I did what any self-respecting chilango does several times each day: I simply plunged forward.

The Los Angeles Times is a Tribune Co. newspaper.


Copyright © 2007, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

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Hi Jimpasz,

Keep in mind that management and control of the NAFTA super highway will belong to Mexico; it's on this website somewhere, but I don't have time to hunt it up. I think the article says that the NAFTA highway itself will be ceded to Mexico along with portions of San Antonio and Kansas City (the terminal operations), meaning that the NAFTA highway and inland terminals will become soverign territories of Mexico.

All that is OBE once the US ceases to exist and the North American Union takes control; certainly Hillary will preside over that.

Well....guess that explaines the driving style that makes my life pass before my eyes numerous times in a day. Seems whoever is the biggest bully wins all the way around. Also explaines why we are having more and more people killed walking on a sidewalk. Sounds like that clip they showed of all the new Chinese drivers.....freeways looked like a bumper car ride.