September 14, 2021

Grumbling about driving in Mexico is one of those activities that even Mexicans join in with, albeit fatalistically.  You never see a car here with a sign saying something like ‘Marco’s Driving School‘ on top of it. A lot of people learn to drive on four hours’ instruction from their parents, or their elder brother, and the fine points of defensive driving are rarely discussed. While people will complain, they also laugh at the fact that Mexico will always be Mexico.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I find local drivers quite good, since they seem situationally aware enough to avoid fender-benders. But the moment someone passes me at 50 kilometres per hour on a local road, I know a city-dwelling outsider is on the way to a near-miss of a cow or horse grazing by the roadside.

A new threat emerged over the past couple of years. I’m told it was primarily Banco Azteca that promoted loans for motorbikes. Lots of people can’t afford a car, but for some people a motorbike is both sexier and cheaper. The problem comes when an increasing number of motorbikes combines with the aforementioned lack of driving expertise. 

A motorcycle can slide between a car and a sidewalk, and if an accident doesn’t happen, then the rule in Mexico is that it was a safe move. Twice in the past couple of weeks I’ve seen someone on a motorbike slip past the inside of a bus, just as it stopped to let off passengers. There are many places where there’s no curb to delineate the edge of the roadway, so the manoeuvre is possible. But if you’re an elderly passenger dismounting, or a mother with a small child and an armload of shopping, the risk is real. One of the two motorcyclists even had his own wife and kid on his bike, and still tried it. It happened outside a coffee shop where I sometimes get a cappuccino, and I had to sponge off the spilled coffee after watching this dumb move nearly result in an elderly woman being knocked down.

Perhaps local peer pressure will influence the motorcyclists in time, but a lot of them are young men with testosterone to burn. The instability of the motorbikes on wet roads with potholes, such as we have everywhere in rainy season, is a better hope.

A less dangerous but still annoying driver trait is corner parking. I don’t know why, but parking at a corner is something people here do all the time. This blocks cars trying to turn, make it difficult for others to pass, and generally create congestion. It seems to be a deeply compulsive activity, some inalienable right that should be exercised in particular at local bottlenecks.

Earlier this year, I was driving a friend home, and he asked me to stop at one of these spots so he could buy paint at a paint store. The store was on one side of the street at the corner, so I drove on forty or fifty feet to let him off. His incredulity that I would make him walk that far, versus my insistence that I don’t believe in blocking intersections, was like advancing an obscure point of quantum physics to a nine-year-old. Or, perhaps, like a silly Canadian fixation. Anything in Mexico can be covered with a smile and a quick “Disculpe!” or so some people feel. My gringo hang-up about avoiding creating a problem in the first place seemed to him like something I needed to get over.

Most of the time, it pays to avoid trying to import outsider values here; I’ve always felt I shouldn’t try to lecture Mexicans about how to behave. But our roads were made for a couple of cars a minute, and a truck five times an hour. Now, the local traffic police actually ticket illegal parkers on Saturdays because congestion in some spots is too severe, which is a bit like police in Alabama arresting people for owning guns.

This part of Mexico is too close to the 20-million people in the capital to avoid urban sprawl, although traffic problems happen everywhere. But if you ever do visit, remember that motorcyclists see you as something to get around, not someone to stop for. And as for parking away from an intersection … just what is your problem, señor?