WALKING ON THIN ICE

street parade below our second floor window - foto by smith

traffic here is loco. our taxi was in the middle lane of three, turning left. the car on our left that was supposed to turn left went straight, cutting us off. the car on our right that was supposed to go straight, turned left right in front of us, just missing the car on our left that went straight.

if a driver hits and kills a person, they get out of the car and run away, or else they go to jail. if you don’t want to run or go to jail, you have to buy the dead person’s family off. there is no “accidental death,” or jury - just run, pay off, or go to jail.

almost every block here there’s a tope. a “toe-pay” is a concrete speed bump that forces traffic to stop before slowly driving over it - slowing down doesn’t work - you have to come to a stop. sometimes the topes are marked with warning signs, sometimes not. any private citizen can have a tope poured on the street in front of their house, as long as they’re willing to pay for the concrete out of their own pocket. fail to slow, and the concrete lumps can break your suspension, your transmission, your axle. i’ve seen topes on dark mountain roads with no people or houses or logical reason for existing. there are thousands of topes in downtown oaxaca.

the buses and taxis speed like mad from tope to tope, stop, creep over, then pedal to the metal to the next tope one block away.

the cars, trucks and buses here have no pollution controls. trucks and buses belch diesel smoke, cars clouds of dirty unburnt gas. there are no noise standards so all the vehicles screech, clang, bang, rattle and roll.

most street intersections have neither stop signs nor traffic lights, so cars slow a bit, look both ways (sometimes) and just keep going. i see near misses every day, but have yet to see an accident.

cars, motorcycles, and bicycles go both ways on most one-way streets. they park on both sides of narrow streets, or on the sidewalks whenever they feel like it.

crowds of people march down the middle of major traffic streets in protest or celebration whenever they feel like it, without getting official permission. traveling store and food vender bicycles weave in and out of traffic, going both with and against the flow. street dogs roam at will.

folks block off streets whenever they feel like it for a carnival, celebration, concert, party.

the sidewalks are so bad, broken, narrow, pot-holed, dangerous and disappeared that pedestrians frequently have to use the streets as sidewalks.

there are times when cars are parked on both sides of the street, another vehicle is double parked, pedestrians are walking in the street, and a big bus is trying to weave its way through the small gap between. often the bus driver’s assistant gets out and walks the bus through the gauntlet with hand signals.

driving here for me would be like playing russian roulette with a fully loaded gun.

pedestrian below our kitchen window - foto by smith