We have smog

Smog isn't a common word in Spanish. We're familiar with it but nobody really uses it. Our large cities naturally have some, always, but it tends not to be that visible. Buenos Aires and Rosario are on a plain beside large bodies of water and with no natural obstacles to keep airborne pollution in its place. I don't know how Córdoba manages that, but I've never heard of it having smog despite being inside a big hole.

When the owners of vast tracts of land in the Paraná Delta's islands started burning the scrubland to prepare those lands for cultivation or pasture, we got to know smog. This is etymologically correct smog I'm talking about — it's smoke plus fog, the latter being caused by cool weather and high humidity.

Now some early morning fog makes for great pictures, but smoke and ashes aren't that healthy, especially at the beginning of winter, when people's respiratory systems are already oversensitive. I didn't feel anything funny myself while taking the photo above, but then most of the blurry stuff was true fog. The lamppost you see near the center of the picture (above the guy's head) was only one block away. When you turned round, the view was much clearer, but a faint greenish-gray screen was readily apparent.

Besides that, I swear I'd never heard of so many plane delays due to smog. These are bad times for road trips too — the road blockages set up by farmers and truck drivers have stopped for the moment, but in this region (say from Rosario to Buenos Aires and around) there's so much fog and smoke that roads are totally or partially closed to traffic every day, until the sun dissolves some of the stuff. And traffic accidents are so common that the radio broadcasts the body count next to the weather forecast.

(I object to calling these "accidents", since in most cases they're caused simply by disrespect for the law, overconfidence and disregard of basic safety measures, for which Argentinians are infamously known. If you find yourself inside an airborne gray soup, the right thing to do is flash your lights appropriately and stop beside the road, no matter if you're late for work or the start of your vacations. And if you see someone stopping beside the road ahead of you, you should consider doing the same. The Argentinian's typical reaction, however, is to trust his good stars, disregard a few near misses, curse the weather, and finally crash into someone and blame the state for not forcing him to stop.)

The fires on the islands are obviously not being monitored by anyone. On any given day it's easy to spot two or more columns of smoke rising from different places along the floodplain of the Paraná, opposite the coast of Rosario.

The fires are intentional or derived from intentional ones. Though the weather might be humid, it hasn't rained a respectable amount for months (in fact the north of Santa Fe has been declared an emergency area because of the drought), so all that withered grass and plants and trees are prone to ignite at the very lightest touch of flame. The wind usually carries the smoke away toward the south (to Buenos Aires), but part of it always remains here and affects the coastal areas of the city. If I can see where it comes from, then the authorities (governors, mayors, police, judges, prosecutors, ecological management offices) can see it as well. Why does nothing happen?

Transport strike!

Rough day today, and it's only 2 PM... Last night a taxi driver was murdered by two men in the north of Rosario. They boarded the taxi as passengers and, a few blocks later, they apparently tried to rob Sergio Oberto, the driver. He was stabbed several times, once in the throat. The attackers fled, leaving him there to die. The news spread quickly, and the taxi drivers' union took to the streets, blocking some and burning tires, to protest against insecurity. By early morning, the two streets that border the downtown area (Oroño Blvd. and Pellegrini Ave.) were almost completely blocked by taxis, forcing buses and private cars to take long detours. I got to work 15 minutes late. I thought that was going to be the biggest inconvenience.

At mid-morning I took one hour off work to go to a doctor's appointment. He was remarkably punctual, so I got back to my office quickly, but as soon as I'd returned, my father called me to warn me that a general transport strike had been declared — starting at noon. It was just past 11 AM. The people at the office were preparing to leave. I took care of my stuff and went to the bus stop. Five minutes later, a group of people coming from the south (where the nearest street blockade was) told me buses weren't entering downtown anymore. I started walking, since I'd seen some buses. I couldn't possibly walk home (well, I could — but it was going to be tough) and I couldn't ask anybody I knew for a car ride. After 10 minutes I decided I'd better try Marisa's house, 20-something blocks from where I was. My bus finally came, packed with people. I and twenty others somehow squeezed into it, and we began our slow progress back home.

When I left the office, the downtown streets were weirdly silent, only a few cars circulating, people with concerned faces speaking on their mobile phones. The cellphone grid collapsed almost immediately, leading me to think what would happen if this were a true catastrophe — everybody's only means of communication would fail at the most critical time! Soon afterward, however, the pupils from all the schools downtown were released by the teachers, everybody was alert, and the streets became chaotic, full of screaming kids wandering and running after buses, disoriented old ladies asking around for news, and cars trying to avoid collisions with the above.

Oberto's wife said the strike made no sense and would solve nothing, that it was disrespectful, and that nobody from the unions or the government had come to comfort her in this time of sorrow. The strike was launched by CGT (Confederación General del Trabajo), the "union of unions" of Peronist roots, allied with the national government. I think it has a clear political intention; the Justicialist Party has been trying to undermine the Socialist government of Rosario for ages, and even more after Peronism lost the provincial elections, and fake "grassroots" demonstrations against the local government on the issue of security have been orchestrated.

The obvious truth is that insecurity is solved by increasing the general standard of living and giving the poor more access to education, not by burning tires and paralyzing a city. I got home safely today. I imagine thousands didn't. Thousands of children missed a school lesson, thousands of people lost a day of work, thousands missed a doctor's appointment or a job interview. Countless innocent people, including mothers with small children, disabled people, old people who can't walk tens of block to get back to their homes, were left to their own devices by leaders who used the understandable rage of their followers to their advantage.

Traffic incidents

One always assumes that, barring the very few intentionally planned homicides and "crimes of passion", people who run over other people with their vehicles are not doing it on purpose in any sense, and traffic accidents are exactly that — bad things which just happen. All too human mistakes. Bad luck. Randomness. Things going bad at the wrong time.

In Argentina, things seem to "go bad" all the time, so our traffic accident record is appalling. Each Monday, on TV, we get the tally of the weekend's road casualties alongside the football match scores. The tally is never zero, or even close to it; often it's in the double digits. Sometimes it's so bad it makes the international news.

In our law there are these two main alternative views of death (I guess this must be the case in other places as well, though the names and details are sure to vary) that apply to traffic accidents. If you killed the other person on purpose — e.g. you drove as carelessly as to make certain that you'd eventually hit someone, or else (as in most cases) you killed the other person truly by accident. You're still guilty in the latter case (unless the victim jumped in front of the car or something like that), but the legal consequences aren't as great as in the other scenario.

Most drivers don't want to run over people and kill them in the streets; yet most drivers in Argentina often drive as if they didn't mind killing themselves and as many other human beings in the process. At the very least they bypass traffic laws that they deem unimportant, put too much trust in their driving skills, and justify themselves with the lamest excuse in the book: "everyone else does it". Think about it, and you'll find it very difficult to continue referring to those dead and maimed human beings as victims of "traffic accidents".

At last the law is doing something about this. A prosecutor is asking the court to change the accusation against a driver who hit a motorbiker and killed him, last November, in Casilda (45 km west of Rosario). The driver was being investigated under the charge of homicidio culposo (that's more-or-less involuntary manslaughter), but the prosecutor wants him to be charged with homicidio doloso (which implies a degree of willfulness, and stops short of plain murder). This is a new one — and it might establish a precedent. Jurisprudence is not as important in our system (which is one of civil law, rather than the common law system of Britain and former British colonies), but a precedent like this cannot be dismissed.

And just what did the driver do? He drove his pickup truck, at about 9 AM on Sunday, down an avenue, at over 70 km/h. He hit a motorbike he couldn't not have seen, and dragged it (and its driver) more than 20 meters. He didn't try to dodge, and he didn't brake. He was in a hurry because he had a punctured tire and wanted to get it fixed before it was completely flat. And he was reported to have been under the influence of alcohol at around 7 AM. We don't know if the report was accurate, because he didn't allow the police to test him — which made his troubles worse.

We simply can't allow ourselves to keep this "shit happens" stance regarding traffic. Motor vehicles are potentially lethal weapons; and as with weapons, it holds true that "cars don't kill people; people do". Maybe this guy gets the sentence he deserves. What I really hope, though, is that this serves a purpose. Let careless drivers think twice about what they do, and the rest of us should stop thinking of traffic accidents as something akin to the weather. They're not random, and neither (as many seem to believe) is a tendency to recklessness embedded in our genes. "We Argentinians are like that, plain and simple", "there's nothing to do about it", "this country will never change" is bullshit.

Leave the car at home

I said this was going to happen, I knew this was going to happen, and I got it right: the Municipality is finally going to take some of those unpopular post-election measures that we need to get rid of the downtown traffic chaos. And the answer is...

... toll parking!

We've had toll parking for several years in Rosario, but only along some selected segments of certain streets in the downtown area. If I'm not mistaken (not having a car this is not something I pay attention to) the price was AR$1.20/hour, really cheap, especially compared to parking lots, which aren't enough anyway.

Mayor Lifschitz's plan, however, is much grander. He wants toll parking in the microcentro (i.e. the denser part of downtown) at 3 pesos per hour, the rest of downtown will be at 2 pesos per hour, and the first urban ring outside downtown at 1 peso; this, combined with a complete prohibition to park along several important streets that tend to get clogged by cars, taxis and buses. If the Deliberative Council approves the bill, toll parking it will be managed by a private company, which will have to put up signs, paint the curbs yellow to indicate forbidden spaces, and look for offenders.

As soon as they learned about this, the representatives of the shop owners cried out: "They're going to turn the downtown into a desert!", and the opposition councilmember Osvaldo Miatello said the plan was "savagery". They pointed out that, when the municipality banned traffic and parking in a small part of the microcentro in 2002, the shops saw their sales plummet. (It didn't occur to them, it seems, than in 2002 Argentina had over half its population below the poverty line — hardly a good time for business, no?), and when the municipality then loosened those restrictions the shop started getting record profits (hello, economic recovery?!).

According to these people, unless shoppers are allowed to get into the downtown with their cars and park them no more than ten short steps from the shop where they want to buy, they'll stay at home, refusing to take the bus or a taxi, refusing to pay three lousy pesos for the comfort of using the car, and refusing to walk even one or two blocks. The downtown will become uncompetitive and an empty shell and people will flee to the shopping malls outside the city center and for the shop owners there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth... Puh-leez!

The only problem that shops face today is the high cost of rented spaces (and even so, the gloomy forecasts I reported in May seem to have been wrong, fortunately). People are living a consumerist fever. Everything costs a lot and goes up, and we keep on buying stuff, probably because we guess that saving is useless...

Circunvalación

Public works galore! I hope this isn't just pre-electoral advertising cum wishful thinking. Not only is a national route to be built between Santo Tomé (near Santa Fe City) and San Francisco, in the border of Córdoba Province, but also the national government is going to pay 300 million pesos to widen our own Avenida Circunvalación by one lane.

Circunvalación means "going around", more as in "doing a detour around". Its a mostly raised two-lane avenue that starts in the south of the city (bordering Villa Gobernador Gálvez) and does a less-than-semicircular sector around most of the urbanized area of Rosario (first west, then north, then east). It ends up there joining the roads that go to the northern metropolitan area and also sends an arm over the river, in the form of the Rosario-Victoria Bridge. It was planned to be (and used to be) like Avenida General Paz in Buenos Aires, but it was inside the municipal jurisdiction. Some neighbourhoods (like Fisherton) were outside from the outset; others spilled out.

Circunvalación must also be a textbook example of a jurisdictional conflict. It's 29 km of road that nobody likes to maintain, with 40,000 vehicles per day. Since it's peripheric and most of it inside poor, dangerous neighbourhoods, there's no popular pressure (from "important" people) to keep it safe. Being formally part of a national road, it should get maintenance (at least filling the potholes) from the national state, or more specifically, the Dirección Nacional de Vialidad (don't ask what vialidad means; it has to do with vías — a fancy way of saying "roads"). The lights and lampposts are vandalized or stolen all the time, but in this case (and by the same regulations) it's the municipal government that has to replace them. The municipality doesn't pay attention to it, in part because it has no money or human resources to change dozens of high-yield lamps a month, least of all guard them so they're not broken or stolen again. And finally, guess who's really in charge of keeping the vandals away? The Santa Fe provincial police. Yes — the ones whence the "fat cop" stereotype came from.

Trying to get these three states to work together and in coordination is like having a cat asking a wolf to cooperate with an elephant to hunt an eagle. They're all very busy and they don't like each other. We the people, in case you were wondering, are the fleas... We mean a lot to the cat, less so to the wolf, and almost nothing to the elephant. Let us hope we can still get the elephant a bit itchy.

When the carrot doesn't work

I've always maintained that draconian measures, when it comes to saving lives, should be the norm in a country like Argentina, where breaking the law is a national sport and a source of pride. In this case, traffic laws.

You will remember I took the time to post about this several times. Well, I still think a person who blocks half the street with a vehicle just because s/he couldn't be bothered to park correctly deserves to be flogged in public (figuratively? I guess). But that's hardly dangerous. Skipping a red light is. The good news is that punishment is working. Thanks to a system of several automatic cameras that can take a shot of your car when you pass by a traffic light, and send you a fine afterwards, the number of red light violations has decreased greatly.

In 2001, after the first cameras were installed by the Municipality in mid-2000, an average of 40 violations were detected per day by each camera. In 2006, the number went down to 19. As of today, there are six (or seven, according to the newspaper that covers the news) cameras, in black-and-white and in colour, located in strategic places in Rosario's main streets.

Some people complain that the cameras take pictures even when the car is not in violation. The authorities explain that this is part of the normal software procedure for speed checks. Obviously, if you're passing a green light, you won't get a fine. Doubting the system is OK, of course, but this reminds me of those other people who complained that there were automatic speed radars in some interurban roads — they said they were like a trap, designed to get money from the drivers. Duh, if you aren't overspeeding, the radar won't catch you!

The head of Spain's traffic authority, Pere Navarro Olivella, visited Rosario recently, and basically said what I've been saying: "Traffic security is [both] awareness and repression." Spain, like Argentina, had a horrific record of deaths by traffic accidents, but unlike Argentina as a whole, it did what had to be done, implementing harsher punishments as well as awareness campaigns.

Traffic accidents have decreased in Rosario because people now know they will be punished (they already knew traffic violations were dangerous — they just didn't care). I don't own a car, so I haven't experienced it myself, but everybody I know who has a car is genuinely (and appropriately) terrified of taking it out if they're planning to drink (or have already drunk) so much as a glass of beer. Municipal inspectors with breath analyzers guard all the major streets, and the least a drunken driver can expect, if caught, is being forced to pay a costly bribe (yes, this is Argentina after all). There's a good chance your car will be confiscated on the spot. I understand that, if you're not drunk but only slightly over the blood alcohol limit, the inspectors will just tell you to stop and stay where you are until you've sobered up, before doing another test.

Seatbelts are also checked — I remember not ten years ago nobody used them, and now all my car-endowed friends wear it casually, and make me wear it.

Now we only have to wait for the next generation of drivers to be raised like that...

Today's highlights

Nice morning, today's morning. I was sitting all the time typing numbers that don't matter to anyone and trying to explain that to my boss without actually saying those words. But that wasn't important. Small things can brighten your day.

Well, first of all, it's Friday. Whatever it brings, weekend means no work.

Then the radio, which we keep on at the office, started receiving calls from people around the city, reporting they'd seen a bright light and a solid white trail of smoke in the sky at around 7:05 AM. Some said it was blue light; one claimed it had lit up the sky briefly. The radio news and variety programme on Radio 2 has a funny staff. As they read out the ridiculous calls and messages left by the audience, others, even more bizarre, came in. Was it a giant firecracker? Some sort of UFO? "Could it be one of Menem's rockets that got stuck in the stratosphere?", said one, bringing back a memorable speech of Carlos (may he never find peace) Menem where he promised to build a platform for some kind of super-airplanes before an audience composed of school kids in the poorest part of the country. It was a meteor, and as it turned out later, it was seen in several provinces. A guy from the Ibero-American Astronomy Guild (LIADA) was consulted, and explained that it must have been a space rock about the size of a fist or a potato that passed through the atmosphere at high altitude at a speed of at least 100,000 km/h (28 km per second!), since that's the speed of Earth moving in its orbit.

I was already at work when it happened, so I couldn't see anything, but it was kind of magical. We don't get to see many astronomical displays like that — in the big city you barely get to see the stars.

As this funny story unfurled, a picket was blocking one of the main accesses to the city in the northwest, near the municipal limit. The picket had been there for days, and it was organized by neighbours of some of the poorest areas of Rosario, affected by the Great Rains, who demanded assistance from the government. As usual, the picket was not dispersed by the police. The road in question is needed for trucks that bring goods and cargo to the city and its port; there are only a few alternatives, and they're not well maintained or prepared to receive more heavy traffic. The result was chaos, a lot of tension and road rage. A truck driver who arrived in Rosario at night, unaware of the blockade, tried to find another route and ended up in the middle of nowhere; his truck was assaulted and robbed, and he was killed. Many citizens called out to the government, demanding that the picket be dissolved by police force. Unlike Buenos Aires, it's only recently that Rosario has had recurring road blocks disrupting traffic; the city is smaller and the people's patience is thin.

During the morning, the provincial government announced that they were waiting for a judge's authorization/command to send the police in. (That sounds a bit awkward, but the K policy is that anything short of shooting people in the street is allowed in a protest, and this is an election year, so the government first asks a judge to evaluate whether the general interests of the public are being hurt by the protest, before moving to suffocate it. This way, they're also covered if a policeman kills someone — the judge ordered it, not them. It's cowardly and unpopular, but then the police are not angels and they tend to overdo things a bit — loading lead instead of rubber bullets "by accident", for example.)

After negotiations and promises, fortunately, officials of the municipal government got the picket to free up one lane of the road, and an agreement was reached — the municipality and the province will work together with the neighbours to assess their needs, see what they lost in the flood, and replace it. They won't hand out cash, which is what the neighbours wanted. But that's OK with them, they say.

Finally, as I left work with a tired look of satisfaction ("it's Friday after work!") into a squeaky-clean-skied sunny afternoon, I caught a new prey for my collection. I swear I wasn't looking for it, but it was so glaringly, so unspeakably wrong that I had to snap a couple of pictures (front and back). I give you license plate UVJ641 (one traffic ticket on record), "parked" in the middle of 9 de Julio St.

Traffic in Rosario: in flagrante delicto

You may remember my recent rants about traffic and car driving in Rosario. I'm going to show you a bit of what I'm talking about. The following pictures were taken as I walked some 10 blocks from the office today. I was specifically looking for confirmation of my theory that most drivers are either retards who can't park, or retards who won't park right.

Exhibit A, parked just around the corner of the Hospital Provincial de Rosario, beside the associated church:

I don't know what this guy was doing, but he left the car there for more than one minute. I know because I went past it, then thought about it, looked around, took my camera out of my backpack, waited until other cars were not present, and grabbed a couple of shots. There's nothing there. The entrances to the church and the hospital are around the corner. There's a supermarket in the corner opposite the one you see (not visible here, on the left), but that's not close. Anyway, the license plate seems to be CSB832 — and thanks to the (recently installed) marvels of technology, the Municipality lets me know that this particular car had five recorded traffic violations in 2004 and 2005, including parking in a forbidden area. None since then, so either the owner during those years sold it to another person, or learned how to escape detection.

Exhibit B, found a few blocks afterwards, is even worse:

In case you were wondering, that wreck of a blue box is a wheeled plastic garbage container covered in graffiti. This guy left the car (license plate VIF788) practically in the middle of the street. You can see there's easily half a metre between the container and the vehicle. Again, this car stayed there with the back lights interminently on for at least two minutes.

The fines for bad parking are highly variable, but I guess if the municipality paid me to walk around with the camera like this, they could afford my salary for free in one or two days.

Regarding this, the head of the Municipal Traffic Secretariat, Hebe de Marcogliese, was interviewed several times in the past weeks. The larger context is the study of what to do with the access of cars to the microcentro, i.e. the area of downtown that is most commercially and socially active. Until 2002, this part of the city was off-limits for private vehicles; then, with the economic crisis at its peak, the businesses of the central area asked and got a suspension of that restriction, and the microcentro was opened for everyone.

Today, with many new cars rolling and a growing economy, it's a nightmare. Cars circulating or stopping where they shouldn't, many bus lines along the same streets, and utility companies' repair teams blocking those streets as well, have turned the microcentro into a chaotic scenario. To those who want the area shut off completely as before, Marcogliese tells that, prior to any drastic measures, we have to comply with traffic rules. If every car was parked correctly and respected the other rules, it'd all much more orderly.

Moreover, the fines will have to rise. Right now, parking in the wrong place can get you between 70 and 800 pesos (US$23–260) if a judge has to decide; much less in other cases. Marcogliese mentions, almost in desperation, that some parents who block the traffic in front of schools at exit time, when faced by a municipal inspector, simply dismiss the problem: "OK, just give me that ticket and leave".

There's an expression, hijos del rigor, that describes the attitude of these people. "Children of severity" would be a translation. Most of us are hijos del rigor, like children who only do what's right when their parents tell them to obey under harsh penalties. Ask any Argentinian about this topic (that is, why we disobey laws that are in place for our own good), and s/he'll end up there eventually. Now, do I have to go draconian on your car?

Traffic in Rosario: rant two

Continuing with the previous post, on to my (current) pet peeve. People here don't seem to understand that a car takes up physical space, and that that's the reason parking is allowed only in certain spots and following certain regulations. From a visual survey I'd say that at least 50% of cars are parked wrongly; even discounting those within the forbidden parts of the block, most people just can't park — they leave the car 40 or 50 cm from the curb, usually not parallel to it, too close to the next car, and blocking important exits.

Drivers also assume that, for things that can be dealt quickly, the car may just be left wherever it suits them, so they park in the middle of the street in a double row in front of a bus stop to go get cigarettes. And worse. I worked with a doctor who left her car in a spot that she knew was illegal for three hours; she checked it every now and then and occasionally moved it, but she wouldn't take it to a car park because it was expensive. My mother tells me people park (illegally) near the bookshop where she works, then get in, demand to be served quickly explaining that the car is on an illegal spot (!), get angry when told that's not a valid reason, and then feel genuinely surprise when they come out and see the municipal patrol taking the car away.

Parking space is a problem in Rosario. With the economic recovery, people drive more and thousands of new cars are coming out as well. There are no municipal regulations about the minimum amount of parking lots, and having one in your building increases your expenses; hiring a space also costs a lot. If you leave it on the street, you run the risk of it being robbed. There are many cuidacoches (car watchers) around — typically poor young men. Years ago they asked the drivers for a coin or two; now they unsubtly demand to be paid up 5 pesos or more to watch for the car, and if you don't give them what they want, your vehicle is practically guaranteed to have a scratch or a broken glass when you come back.

Anyway, while the cuidacoches are a mafia, they're a fruit of these times. It always surprises me when people spend loads of money to buy and maintain a car, yet are so cheap as to leave the car in the street instead of paying for a safer place, and then complain about insecurity and how "it's a shame" to have those lumpen blackmailing drivers.

Traffic in Rosario: rant one

I've previously spoken of traffic in Rosario. This topic is also one of the favourite of newcomers in Argentina as a whole. Despite the horrific rate of accidents, nobody understands how the death toll is not higher, or how the system works at all instead of grinding to a complete halt in a kind of perpetual traffic jam. Don't worry — I don't get it either.

What follows is my personal experience as a carless person who uses the bus daily (and often more than once), rides a bicycle twice a week at least, and walks a lot around many places. First, the bus...

For those not accustomed, riding the bus is an adventure. You signal at it, and the driver may or may not see you. By law, cars cannot park 15 meters from any corner, and in the case of bus stops, 30 meters; in reality, people park their cars within mere centimeters of other cars and up to the very corner. The bus should ideally slow down, place itself parallel to the sidewalk and close enough that the person is not forced to come down to the street before getting on the bus; in reality, the bus usually winds its way among misparked cars and stops in the middle of the street. When two buses do this at once, the driver might choose to overcome the other bus on the far side, leaving behind the would-be passengers desperately waving at it from the sidewalk.

There are no queues for the bus here in Rosario, as I understand there are in Buenos Aires. People just gather as the bus stops, and then it's sauve qui peut. School kids and teenagers consistently lack the minimum of education and civility to let pregnant women and handicapped people go first. I used to be corteous — I let women and senior people get on the bus first; then I noticed several things: 1) nobody ever said thank you for it; 2) feminists fought long for gender equality; 3) seniors, especially women, are the least polite of people — they always elbow their way into the bus regardless of anything. Therefore I only let pregnant mothers, people carrying babies (real babies, not just older kids that refuse to walk), senior citizens with obvious difficulties to walk or stand, blind people, other people with canes or prosthetic limbs, and the like. Screw "ladies first". Screw schoolkids too — they're young and they do nothing all day, so they can wait. And it'd be nice if they gave a seat to their not-so-elders.

Once you're in the bus, the driver will try to take you to your destination, even if that takes running over cyclists and bark insults at car drivers to make room. Remember this is a public transport "professional" behind the wheel of a large vehicle, and he makes AR$4,000 a month — more than twice what a medical chief of residents in a hospital makes, more then three times what an elementary school teacher makes.

Now, so you don't think I'm just an ever-nagging old man, I do think Rosario's bus system is a wonderful thing to have. I've been to other large cities where buses are old and worn out, their routes are extremely limited, and the frequency is irregular and very spaced, so you have to rely on an also defective, and expensive, taxi fleet.

My current pet peeve, however, is car parking. If you thought my capacity to rant was limited, that'll prove you wrong.

By bicycle in Rosario

A reader asks about bikes and traffic in Rosario. I replied in brief in a comment yesterday, but I thought it'd be more useful and visible to expand on that now.

You've surely all heard that driving in Argentina is complete madness. That's partly true... It's not that drivers are mad; they just feel free to ignore or bend the rules, re-interpreting them according to the occasion. Some of them are truly mad, in the sense that they don't seem to perceive reality in the same way as pedestrians and other drivers; for example, they see an empty parking space where in fact there is a bus stop, or they fail to see other vehicles except those larger than their own.

Bikers are a special case. There are some who drive reasonably well, but most (including me) ignore the traffic lights and zebra crossings whenever possible. A bicycle can't get fined for crossing a red light. Truth be told, these minor violations often make up for the physical disadvantage of bicycles faced with motor vehicles much faster and sturdier, but in turn they work against the next weaker ones in the scale — pedestrians. Bicycles appear from nowhere at lightning speeds, trying to stay ahead of the mass of cars, and often miss overconfident pedestrians by mere inches. Bikers make U-turns seconds before the light turns to red in their lane in a two-way avenue, turn left where they shouldn't, zigzag between buses and trucks, and in general they (we) barely use the brakes.

I love my bike and the sense of freedom it gives me, but at times I get a bit afraid of it as well. I like the fact that it's free (as in beer), comparatively small (don't need a special place to park it!), and much faster than going on foot, even if not all that flexible for urban exploration (you can get almost anywhere on foot). Anyone who's ever grown accustomed to a vehicle knows about "the zone", that trance-like state when you feel completely in tune, one with the machine. You must be in "the zone" when you're driving a bike in Rosario, even as it's awfully dangerous, because otherwise you'll get crushed the first time you get distracted.

Bicycles have traditionally been the poor's vehicle in Argentina. This, of course, made it popular by necessity in the 1990s. In 2002, right after the Big Crunch, you'd get out to catch the bus at dawn and see swarms and swarms of construction and factory workers in their overalls, pedalling like crazy, all in synch so as to remain grouped — for a lone biker was (is) an easy prey for thieves. According to a study, there were 340,000 bicycles in Rosario in 2002, about one per three inhabitants.

There are still many people going to work every day by bike. Others use it to transport their partners or their whole family. Three people (two adults, one child) in a single bicycle is a terrible thing — unstable and very dangerous — but some have no alternative. Consider that a round bus trip for three costs AR$7.20 — less than 3 dollars, yet enough to buy a kilo of acceptable-quality beef. Needless to say, most bikers don't bother to wear helmets or any other protective devices (motorbikers, who are obliged by law, usually don't wear them either).

I don't go to work by bike, because it'd take me an hour to get there and I'd arrive hecho sopa (soaked), and because I can (still) afford the bus. The Japanese Association, however, is only 20 minutes away, and its informality makes it a bit more acceptable for me to be a bit sweaty when I arrive, so I'm considering going to Japanese class on two wheels. Better for my health, better for my budget, and better for the environment.

Rosario has many places acceptable for bicycle riding, but comparatively very few bike paths. For reasons of space, the whole downtown area can't have paths at all, since there's barely room for cars and buses as it is. There are no wide avenues across Rosario's compact center, but a grid of very narrow streets that may have been fine for carriages and horses in 1900, but get congested easily with 21st century traffic. Driving a bike there is tantamount to suicide.


The municipal policies encouraging the use of bicycles often collide with other local policies or turn out to be just declarations of good will, soon forgotten. Lately, though, newly-opened sections of major avenues do usually come with good bicycle paths.

You may have heard of Argentina's horrific traffic accident record. The media have been focusing on this for some time now, with spectacular, dramatic pleas for better traffic laws and monitoring technology, when every now and then a handful of people die on the road. Argentinians generally drive very badly, but always place the blame elsewhere. I intended to write about this today, but I'll leave that for tomorrow or next week, as this post has gotten too long.