danajohnhill.org | Hard Times Come Again No More

SAN JUAN – Where ever it is that you live, you can probably depend upon a certain minimum level of traffic control.  Street signs, traffic lights, medians, dividers, lanes, and so on.  In Puerto Rico, those things are rare luxuries.  Put simply, this place is Thunderdome.

Each morning, we walk across the street in front of our hotel to the lot where our rented Nissan waits for us.  Parking isn’t a problem.  It’s expensive, but spaces are ample.  Depending on where we’re going, we turn either right or left.  Left takes us into Old San Juan, or the highways that lead to the western and southern portions of the island.  Cities like Arecibo and Aguadilla are reached via PR-2, which roughly follows the contours of the Atlantic coast.  Ponce, near the Caribbean coast, requires a journey south, via PR-52.  To reach the eastern portion of the island, we turn right out of the parking lot, travel down some two-lane roads past public beaches and vendors selling all manner of Puerto Rican cuisine, and connect to PR-3, which leads to Fajardo.

Some of these highways are limited-access freeways like the Interstate system.  Elsewhere, they are more like standard American highways, with at least two lanes in each direction, but intersections and direct access from shopping centers and local streets.  Some have tolls, though they are spread far apart, and are inexpensive.  The highest I encountered was $1.50, and most were half that.

Depending on where you’re going, however, these highways may get you only half way there.  The center of the island is rural, rugged and mountainous.  Though the peaks don’t generally exceed a few thousand feet, they do so from sea level and are quite steep.  The two-lane roads that connect the small towns in the interior are unlike anything I’ve ever seen in the USA.  First and foremost, almost none have lane markers.  (That goes for many of the main highways, too, where the first few hundred yards on either side of an intersection have no lines of any kind.)  This means that drivers move freely across the surface of the road.  On a four-lane highway, it’s bad enough to constantly fear that the driver in the lane next to you will try to move over.  On narrow roads high in the mountains, a car in your lane as you round a corner may mean certain death.  Meanwhile, these rural two-lane roads in the mountains are narrower than an average American driveway.  Imagine the door of your two-car garage.  Now, imagine coming around a blind corner fifteen hundred feet above the forest floor, finding a car in what should be your lane–if there was one–and having to pass in the space of that open garage door.  Imagine doing that at speed, where a false move will send you down into a ravine.  That happens a dozen times every kilometer in Puerto Rico.  (Curiously, distances are measured in kilometers, but speed limits in miles per hour.)

Meanwhile, the narrow, lane-less roads are invariably in terrible condition.  Huge potholes dot every street, rural or urban.  In cities, drivers must avoid these, while simultaneously dodging deep-set manhole covers placed in a seemingly random fashion, and wide metal grates which aid in drainage.  One such grate awaits those who exit PR-26 at Isla Verde.  If you know it’s there you can try and slow down, because hitting it at forty-five miles per hour would be devastating to tires.

Making things worse, Puerto Rican drivers do not use turn signals.  Ever.  You never know what anyone is going to do until they do it.  And they practice something Miriam refers to as “nudging”, in which, when leaving a shopping center or trying to change lanes at an intersection, they just push the noses of their cars into traffic, forcing others to either let them in, or crash into them.  Nudging may be so necessary and frequent because the names of streets are seldom indicated with visible signage.  If you’re lucky, you’ll see some faded tiles on the side of a corner building.  But you will frequently go for blocks in a city without seeing anything indicating where in the world you are.  It’s indescribably aggravating.

Add to all of this an innate Puerto Rican recklessness, and you have the recipe for disaster.  And yet, after seven days and almost nine hundred miles of driving, I saw only one accident – on my very last day.  I’ve never made the hour and a half drive from Gainesville to Orlando without passing at least one accident.  This afternoon, after watching a bicyclist charge blindly into traffic on a busy Ponce street, I came to a conclusion: God loves Puerto Ricans and protects them from automotive disaster.  The combination of bad roads and bad driving here made me expect to see corpses piled high beside shredded wreckage, but, no.  Some divine hand is keeping them safe.  May it be ever thus.

Filed under: Geography, Transportation, Travel on August 20th, 2009