As we drive on the four-lane highway into town, the overall slope of the land has us going downhill. We approach Terramall on our right, an enormous mall with a movie theater, food-court, plenty of shops, a pet store, and an enormous outdoor terrace complete with a fountain and plenty of restaurants taking advantage of the wonderful mountainside view.
The mall is big enough in fact, that the two right lanes suddenly turn into four to accommodate mall traffic and the busses that stop to collect their passengers.
One would think that two extra highway lanes would be enough to satisfy the extra traffic demands on this small stretch of thoroughfare. However, in true Costa Rican fashion, those who regulate such things as these thought an additional speed reduction would be necessary for this 1/10 mile length of pavement. So for a small fraction of a mile, the cars that were once traveling at a comfortable 90 kilometers per hour (about 56 mph) must reduce their speed to a maximum of 60 kmph (about 37 mph).
As I look right, those extra two lanes sit unused. The mall is closed. And we're going 37mph.
Actually, even when the mall is open, we're still going 37mph for mall traffic that does not take up anything close to two lanes.
This classic example of Costa Rican law at work is one of many images I hope to leave in your mind of the unparalleled body that is the Costa Rican Bureaucracy.
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Actually, I only want you to know that Costa Rican traffic laws just don't work.
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Actually, I only want you to know that Costa Rican traffic laws just don't work.
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So where was I? Oh yes. 37mph.
Well, to tell the truth, I lied about 37mph.
37mph is the speed limit. But that's not what we're driving, not 'till recently anyway. That's not what anybody's driving! Everybody's driving 56mph because it's faster, but mainly because traffic laws in Costa Rica don't really apply to how you drive.
(That...makes sense...right? ...Okay, maybe not.)
(That...makes sense...right? ...Okay, maybe not.)
It's not like laws don't exist in the Costa Rican transportation sector. They do. In fact, making new laws is one of their favorite things to do. They are just very, very poorly enforced. (In fact, the incompetence of the Costa Rican police-force as a whole never ceases to astound me.) That is to say, though the traffic laws written down somewhere on paper might closely resemble North American traffic laws, on the real road, most are practically non-existent.
For example, the law says not to drive on the shoulder of the road, yet as we continue on our way to school, the right lane is occupied by two stopped rows of cars, taking advantage of the broad shoulder that exists there, each trying to have the right of way as they all turn right.
In the faster moving left lane, a jerk who's more important than the rest of us cuts to the front of the intersection and then attempts a perpendicular merge into the stand-still traffic in the right lane.
The highway ends in a T, turning into a 2-lane road (another brilliant Costa Rican feat of engineering), built when there were half as many cars in the country. Cars turning left off the highway immediately encounter another intersection (No like, immediately. Like, as soon as you turn.) that is set at an angle, making it more like a 7-way intersection.
A single police officer reports to duty on week mornings to straighten out this 7-way intersection.
There's a bus that comes every morning that needs to turn left across the second, odd intersection, only to find that his way is blocked by another lane of stand-still traffic. One block to our right is a stop-light, which does little to help the situation, because no one in the country seems to know how to synchronize stop lights. (Also funny is the fact that it seems the traffic light that was meant for our intersection was stupidly located one block away. But that's a whole 'nother blog post.)
The kind police-woman who is watching our intersection does nothing about the turning bus, which now sits blocking a whole lane of traffic, because he can't turn. The people blocking his way can't go anywhere because of the well-placed traffic light two blocks down. The police-woman kindly waits until the light two blocks down turns green, and lets the situation play itself out. No one in the oncoming left lane is willing to wait and let the bus in, so he must inch his way toward the solid line of cars until someone is forced to either let him in or be crushed.
We have literally sat for almost ten minutes as a single bus attempts to make the hardest turn of his entire route. But eventually the bus makes it through, and everyone cheers, but only for an instant, because they soon must resume their fight for the right to drive on the road.
It's chaos.
It's all just chaos.
Even with a police officer present, people are not concerned with the law or about others, but only about getting themselves where they need to go, regardless of the cost to those around them. Police officers rarely serve any purpose in traffic besides acting as miniature traffic lights themselves, which at least allows traffic to move somewhat. But other than that, I look around and see a system in which any "rules" that existed before are pushed to the back of the mind. They're the elephant in the room that nobody wants to acknowledge.
The problem in Costa Rica is not that we lack rules. It's not that there are no laws here that dictate how people should drive on the roads. And it's not that people aren't smart or simply don't know. The problem is that society as a whole, at least in regards to driving, has no reason to follow any rules given to them telling them how to drive, and that Law Enforcement has no motivation to make them want to enforce the law.
And so as a result, lawmakers resort to very silly, very exaggerated measures to try to solve this problem of total indifference to the law/lack of law enforcement.
It's much like trying to loose weight by going on a cookie diet when in reality your real problem is not that you are overweight, it's that you have a very bad habit of overeating. If you go on your diet, then not only are you not attacking the right problem, you're attacking the wrong problem the wrong way anyway. If anything, at the end you'll be less healthy and even more inclined to eat. And you never find out why you're still fat.
Having lived here for seven years, I can't tell you how how perfect of an example this is!
The problem with the laws here is that people don't have a reason to follow them, and police don't have a reason to enforce them. Legislature likes to look at a situation, pick out an individual symptom of the actual problem, and pound it into the ground.
Take the most recent example of this behavior:
As we pass by the mall at more than 37mph, we now have an new set of eyes that are watching us. At a very specific point, just past the mall, the government has installed two speed cameras that are programmed to take anyone's picture going over 80 kmph. (That's 20 kmph leeway.)
These little guys have apparently been installed at strategic places all over the country, though they must not really be that concerned with catching all the speeders, because our cameras are only trained on traffic going one direction.
The new speed cameras are a living testimony to the efficiency of the Bureaucracy. Upon taking a photo of your speeding car, you instantly receive a $600+ fine. Following logic, your ticket is mailed to you so that you know you were speeding and have a pending fine to pay.
––Wait, did I say they did things logically? Oh, I'm sorry! I meant to say that instead of notifying you that you have a $600 fine to pay, they publish your license-plate number once in a government newspaper that nobody buys! This fine begins to collect interest after two months if you don't pay it completely off, which is stupid, because $600 is easily a month's salary for many Costa Ricans. That means that, unless you start buying this newspaper every single day, you will more than likely never realize you have a ticket, and then at the end of they year, when your vehicle must pass inspection, you realize you have a fine for the average American's equivalent of $3000 that the government never told you about!
La Nación, the national newspaper, reported that the very first 16 hours, the government handed out 1,803 tickets.
However, in my opinion, there is no way on this EARTH that 1,803 people a day are going to pay a month's salary for a speeding ticket.
What's more, avoiding the cameras is cheap and easy. So why wouldn't people do it?! A simple clear plastic license plate cover is all it takes to prevent a clear picture. In response, the government imposed a $60 fine for anyone found with an illegal cover on their plates. But if you had to choose between a $60 and a $600 fine, which would you pick?!
And thus, the cameras will be thwarted. The people with tickets will complain and refuse to pay, and the government will be forced to go back on their plan and start from scratch.
Personally, I think the whole situation's hilarious and hopelessly pathetic.
The problem is that there is no law enforcement. Seriously. It doesn't exist. Traffic police are non-existent, with the exception of those that stand at busy intersections directing traffic. And I doubt they even have the power to arrest someone if they decided to blow the red light! They certainly couldn't chase you down. (Most don't even have working cars, and would never leave their post for a single person.) The only sort of traffic stops are rare and checkpoint-style. And on top of that, people just don't care!
But instead of fixing law enforcement, we've attacked speeding
It just doesn't work! Speeding is the least of the country's problems!
Of course, the obvious thing to say is that if you don't speed, then you don't have to worry about it! But that's not my point.
My point is this:
There is a problem. And we know it. But we're refusing to try to fix it. Because it's easier to turn a blind eye to the problem than to try and remedy it. Because we've grown complacent with the problem, and we've resorted to fake measures to adopt the appearance that we want to fix it. Because to fix the problem would mean less comfort. To fix the problem would mean giving up freedoms. To fix the problem would require sincere effort and a complete change in lifestyle.
So we turn a blind eye, and we just don't fix it.
And in Costa Rica's case (and in a gazillion other countries), it's how it's always been. In the end, the country will continue on how it always had, with nobody enforcing traffic laws, everybody breaking them, and every man driving for themselves. And it will be chaos. It will all be chaos.
And so I ask, what problems are you not fixing?
ZJK (Ima' start including a nifty signature now! I hope you think I'm really cool.)
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*UPDATE*
I've gone back and researched my facts, and it will have to be something I learn to do from now on. I had heard and mistakenly wrote that 6,000 tickets were handed out the first day. However, I was not responsible and did not check my facts. I've now gone back and figured out that, in fact, there were only 1,815 people had received fines for going 20kmph or more over the speed limit.
It also is worth saying that, although my post does satirize the actions of the Costa Rican government, I must retract the statement I made where I said that "No one tries to fix the pressing problems in society." This is partly true because of our human nature, but I can't fairly say that about every government, least of all about Costa Rica's government. We all like to poke fun at government endeavors that seem doomed to fail, and my point about recognizing problems and not being willing to fix them can still stands and can still be applied to our lives (if not with this example, then with other problems that can be found in our society), but I kind of feel bad saying that these cameras are a weak and futile effort.
Yes, I think there are way smarter ways that officials could have thought of to notify people that they had an outstanding fine, and yes, I still think that a minimum fine of a month's salary for many people is absolutely ridiculous. However, the endeavor does represent a desire to improve Costa Rica's traffic conditions, contrary to what I had said before—that lawmakers were essentially trying to rid themselves of the responsibility of fixing the problem.
I must therefore give them credit where credit is due.
According to La Nación, Francisco Jiménez, minister of Transportation in Costa Rica, said himself they know the fines are high-pressure, but that that's the whole point of installing the cameras, to create a very strong incentive for drivers to change their driving habits, slow down, and avoid a strong blow to their purses.
He was quoted as saying, "At first there are going to be a lot of fines, but as the days go by, drivers will get used to and start recognizing monitored areas, and from that moment on is when the number of fines will begin to level off."
So perhaps these traffic cameras do not represent such a naïve effort. But I still don't think they will work.
ZJK
(You can read the article form La Nación, in Spanish, here: http://www.nacion.com/2011-09-09/ElPais/Camaras--hicieron-en-16-horas-multas-de-velocidad-de-un-mes.aspx