El Residente January / February 2017
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A Day in The Life by Allen Dickinson
Driving in Costa Rica
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This piece is adapted from a New York Times article about driving in Italy, written over thirty years ago. Because it so aptly applies to present-day driving in Costa Rica, it was too good not to share. Presented with thanks and apologies to the original author.
Attitude Preparation
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There is a simple method of achieving the right state of mind for driving in Costa Rica; before you start your car for the first time, sit in the driver’s seat, hold the steering wheel, and think the following, “I am the only driver on the road and mine is the only car.” It may be hard to accept, especially after you have seen San José at any time during a week day, but many Tico drivers believe it, and so can you. Consequently, a local driver’s reaction to any encounter with another vehicle is, first, stunned disbelief and then outrage. You don’t have a chance unless you can match this faith. It isn’t enough to say you are the only driver, or to think it—you’ve got to BELIEVE it. Remember, your car is THE CAR—all others are aberrations in the divine scheme of the universe.
The Law
In Costa Rica, as elsewhere, there are laws about stop signs, maximum permissible speeds, which side of the street you can drive on, and so forth. Here, however, these laws exist only as tests of character and self-esteem. Stopping at a stop sign, for example, is prima facie evidence that the driver is, if male, a cuckold or, if female, frigid and barren. Contrarily, driving through a stop sign is proof, not only that you are virile or fertile, but that you are a Person of Consequence. Every Tico’s dearest desire is to be an exception to the rule—any rule. Remember, therefore, that signs, laws, and the commands of the Policía Municipal are only for the lowly.
The City Streets
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The basic rule of driving in Costa Rican cities is as follows: Force your car as far as it will go into any opening in the traffic. It is this rule which produces the famous Gordian Knot—a four-way deadlock where nobody can proceed. Sharp studies suggests that the deadlock can be broken only if any one of the cars backs up.
That brings up another important point about Costa Rican city driving; you can’t back up because there is another car right behind you. If you could back up, however, and did, you would become an object of ridicule, for backing up breaks the basic driving rule and suggests a lack of virility.
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The impossibility of backing up accounts for some of the difficulty you will have in parking. Aside from the fact there isn’t anywhere to park, you will find that when you try to parallel park by stopping just beyond the vacant space and backing into it, you can’t because that fellow is still right behind you, blowing his horn impatiently. If you point at the parking space, make gestures indicating that you on want to park, he blows his horn. You can give up and drive on or you can get out and go back and try to get him to back up and let you park. This you do by shouting personal abuse into the window of his car. In that instance, one of two things will happen: the Tico may shout personal abuse back at you or, he may stare sullenly straight ahead and keep on blowing his horn. (If the second happens, you’re whipped, for no foreigner can out-sulk a Tico driver.)
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The parking problem created by the backing up problem creates the Right Lane Horror. At no time in a Costa Rican city should you drive in the right lane. One reason is that is where the buses stop to load and unload passengers. Another is that Costa Ricans usually drive head first into parking spaces. Thus, every third or fourth parked car has its tail end sticking out into the traffic making the right lane a narrow, winding adventure. Unfortunately, the left lane also has its hazards; the right lane drivers swerving in and out of the left lane as they steer around the buses and sterns of half-parked and double-parked cars. (Ticos double park only in four lane streets; in six lane streets they triple park.)
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Right lane driving is further complicated by the Costa Rican style of entering from a side street by driving halfway into the first lane of traffic and then looking to see if another vehicle is approaching. The way to deal with these Lane Swervers and Cross Creepers is to blow your horn and accelerate around them. If you make a careful, polite in-line stop when your lane is invaded, you not only expose your social and sexual inadequacies, but you may never get moving again, since you also mark yourself as a weakling whom anyone can challenge with impunity.
While performing these dangerous gyrations, it is imperative to blow your horn. The more risky the maneuver, the more imperatively you must hoot, for all Tico drivers accept the axiom that anything you do while blowing your horn is sacred. (Horn blowing, incidentally, except in cases of serious danger, is against the law in many Costa Rican cities. I mention this because you would never know it otherwise.)
Another thing to remember is that one way streets in Costa Rica are not one way. To begin with, a driver who has a block or less to go assumes that when the one-way sign were erected, they were not thinking of cases like his. He drives it the wrong way, going full throttle to get it over with quickly and to prove that he really is in a terrible hurry. More important, however, is to realize that many Costa Rican one way streets also have a contra lane; that is, a lane for going the wrong way. It is reserved for taxis and buses and, indeed, is always full of taxis and buses, producing the Two-Way One-Way Street, which, in turn, produces law suits, pedestrian fatalities, and hysterical foreign drivers.
A distinctive feature in Costa Rican cities is the rotonda—a circular path fed by as many as eight streets. Costa Rican traffic commissioners have sensibly ordained one-way, circular traffic for most of the rotondas. But the traffic circle, with its minuet-like formality of movement is, to a Tico driver, an exhilarating opportunity to out-bluff other drivers by taking the shortest cross-lane path from their point of entrance to the intended exit, all the while sounding their horn and flashing their lights.
All Costa Rican city driving requires (and soon produces) familiarity with the Funnel Effect. Especially in those cities that preserve narrow pathways as streets, which basically means all Costa Rican cities, you will find that four lane streets often, after four or five blocks, become a two-lane and then a one-lane street. Since many Costa Rican cities are force-fed with automobiles by an excellent Pista (highway) system, this produces both the Funnel Effect and the Reverse Funnel Effect.
At first glance it may appear that the Funnel Effect is more dangerous and unnerving than the Reverse Funnel Effect. This is not correct. True, the unwary motorist entering a Funnel may get trapped against one side or the other and have to stay there until traffic slacks off around one or two o’clock in the morning, but you can usually abuse your way out of the trap.
It is the Reverse Funnel which produces what insurance companies refers to as “death or dismemberment.” Imagine the effect of bottling a number of prideful and excitable Costa Rican drivers in a narrow street for half a mile or more and then suddenly releasing them. It’s like dumping out a sack of white rats. As each car emerges, it immediately tries to pass the car ahead of it and, if possible, two or three more. The car ahead is passing the car ahead of it, and so on. If all Costa Rican cars were of even roughly the same power, this would simply produce wild, group acceleration. But, in Costa Rica the car engines range from 500 cubic centimeter midgets up through Formula 1 racing cars, and the first hundred yards of the Reverse Funnel, before the shakedown, produces a maelstrom of screaming engines, spinning tires, and blaring horns.
On The Highway
Costa Rican roads, just like Costa Rican streets, change their character unexpectedly. It is not unusual to be driving on a four-lane, modern asphalt highway, then round a curve and find that you are suddenly driving on a two-lane, sunken road with man-sized potholes. In reality however, most roads are somewhere in between these extremes.
The paramount feature of Costa Rican highway driving is la Paseo, meaning both “to pass with an automobile” and “to surpass or excel.” To paseo someone is to excel him socially, morally, sexually, and politically. By the same token, to be paseoed is to lose status, dignity, and reputation. Thus, it is not where you arrive that counts, but what (or whom) you pass on the way. The paseo procedure is to floor your accelerator and leave it there until you come upon something you can pass. If la Paseo is not immediately possible, settle in the wake of the intended target, at a distance of six or eight inches, blow your horn and flash your lights until such time as you can pass. Passing becomes possible, in the Costa Rican theory, whenever there is not actually a car to your immediate left, regardless of road width, or lane markings. Paseo, however, can also take place on the right side of the vehicle being overtaken.
When a Tico driver sees the car ahead of him slow down or stop, he knows there can be but two causes. The driver ahead has died at the wheel, or else he has suddenly and mysteriously become a Person of No Consequence, which is roughly something which, in Costa Rica, hangs over every driver’s head. He, therefore, accelerates at once and passes at full speed. If the driver ahead has, in fact, stopped for a yawning chasm, the passer is done for. More often, however, the driver has merely stopped for a stop light. The same thing, naturally, is happening on the other side of the intersection and the result is the Cross Double Cross; the instant the light changes, all four drivers obey the Law of Occupation of Empty Space and the four cars meet in the middle of the intersection, followed closely by the cars which are tailgating them. What follows is the Four Handed Personal Abuse in which the drivers of the two right lane cars usually team up against the drivers of the two left lane cars, but this is by no means a rule. Sometimes those in the newer or more expensive cars team up against the ones in the cheaper, older cars.
In Costa Rica you will see big trucks—huge, semis with cabs seating four abreast. There are no special speed limits for trucks enforced in Costa Rica. As if the very sight of these things was not terrifying enough, the drivers often paint mottos across their cabs just above the windshield, usually religious. It can be nerve-shattering to meet one of these monsters coming down a narrow mountain road at fifty miles an hour, and panic may loom if you see “God is Driving” written on the cab, while “Heart of Jesus, Help me” does bear thinking about.
The Pedestrian
It is gauche to be a pedestrian in Costa Rica; a pedestrian is a Person of No Consequence. The Costa Rican pedestrian feels ashamed of their status and does everything they can to avoid acting like a pedestrian. To cross the street in the crosswalk, for instance, would be admitting they are a pedestrian. To cross the street, the Tico crosses in the middle of the block, strolling slowly through the traffic, trying to make it clear that they are not a pedestrian at all, but a driver who has momentarily alighted from their car. If you treat them like a pedestrian, thus drawing attention to their shame, they will be furious. Do not look directly at them. Do not drive around them. Above all, do not stop for them. If they challenge you to drive within four inches of their toes, drive within four inches of their toes, as if they were not there. Of course, if you drive on their toes they will shout personal abuse and call a cop.
The Scooter Plague
To get some idea of the Costa Rican Scooter Plague, imagine all the chinks between cars filled with hurtling motor scooters, each sounding its tinny horn, racing its motor, and emitting a small cloud of hydro-carbons. I used to think that nothing could be worse than the Costa Rican Scooter Plague, but I was wrong. As young Ticos have accumulated more money in their pockets, the Scooter Plague has given way to the Cheap Chinese Motorcycle Menace which is louder, faster, and altogether more surpassing.
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It is at this point the original narrative cuts off. Rumor has it that the author was seriously injured by a motorcycle traveling at break-neck speed while its Tico driver was simultaneously texting his novia about their plans for the evening.