Rob-Rivera.com

Panamanians and Jaywalking

I was with my dad doing the morning commute to the office and while he rambled on about the topics he likes to angrily rant about I kept prying into other cars, trying to tune out the noise. We were in Via España, a 5-lane, one way avenue that is one of the main arteries of the city and where everyone who does anything productive on a daily basis must drive through at least once a day. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, traffic in Panama is fundamentally stupid, as reckless and dangerous as you would imagine your worst vehicular nightmare. I could go on and on about this, how Panamanian drivers seem to step inside a parallel universe the moment they sit in front of the steering wheel, a plane of existence where they can quite literally risk being the meaty center of a car sandwich by blatantly crossing 3 lanes and a double yellow line in order to catch a green light before it changes. It might sound fun to you as you read it, but when I see a 30-year old, raggedy bus doing 50 mph and coming straight at us with complete disregard of our existence, my balls will be in my mouth.

In a city where the public transportation sector sees itself as the king of the road, running red lights and doing hit-and-runs like nobody’s business, and no fines issued for jaywalking, being a pedestrian can be a very dangerous proposition. I saw on the news that a 2007 report done by one of the local news channels has that at least 10 people per year die because they got run over by some rogue bus driver. I heard that a lady got run over after literally jumping out of the bus because it was her stop and bus drivers generally want to make as much money as possible during their shifts, so often they won’t brake on bus stops as much as they slow down so that passengers can jump off. The bus in question stopped in the middle of the avenue because the driver couldn’t have the common decency to veer and stop at the bus stop like you’re supposed to. The lady died. And that’s just the busses; I think it’s a given that for every 10 car crashes you see on the street, 8 of them involve a cab. Those guys are bus drivers with sedans.

We had a bus behind us in the stoplight, honking like a sailor who’s just seen land, and my attention is diverted to the cop that’s directing traffic. Cop uniforms are of a light chocolate cover and don’t seem very weather-resistant. Adding insult to injury, most cops tend to wear the bright yellow vests that make them such easy targets. This lady looked visibly upset directing traffic, as if she had lost a bet and was stuck there for a week as penance; an ordinance from early 2007 gave regular cops the faculty to issue traffic tickets where they saw fit, as well as perform other traffic-specific functions like… you guessed it: directing traffic. The populace saw this as another method for cops to bribe the life out of them, and so far it’s worked wonderfully well… for the police. The cop wants to get off her shift quickly, and as if she was capable of controlling the flow of time by buffering traffic flow, she would make hand gestures, signaling drivers to hurry up. Add to this the lovely voice commentary she would accompany her hand movements with, with gems such as “are you asleep at the fucking wheel, you mental retard?” and “Hurry. The. FUCK. UP.” In case you’re wondering, we could hear what she’d yell because, even though she was a good 10 meters away, we were at the front of the line and had Dolby Surround sound on the proceedings. My dad and I just marked it off as funny and chose to ignore it.

That’s when the sir with a lunch bag over his shoulder thought it’d be a good time to cross Via España while we were held, the cop letting cars from the intersecting street cross.

The mister waits until the Via España traffic stops to begin trekking the white line in order to cross the street (Panama doesn’t have many green/red walking lights, and it’s not until recently that people pay more attention to the ones we do have). Everything’s going fine, until the cop signals cars wanting to turn left into Via España (we were at the intersection that breaks the two-way/one-way legs of the avenue), and since everyone that drives is in a constant sense of urgency, the cars speed off to make the turn while the mister is still crossing the street. So, the first driver stops to let the very scared sir pass, and as he walks hastily the cop screams at him for holding up the traffic. Let me write that again for you: the police woman screams to the top of her lungs, calling this sir an idiot for crossing the street USING THE WHITE LINE LIKE HE SHOULD for holding up the traffic. The sir ignored her until he crossed the street, and that should’ve been it; even if that lady was having the worst day of her existence, she had much more pressing matters to attend to like, for example, the potential traffic jam she had in her hands. But no, she wouldn’t have that guy ignore her so she took it up a notch with her thick Colon accent. She screamed louder.

“What kind of a fucking idiot crosses the street when there are cars driving on the street?! Juega vivo, idiot! You would have gotten run the fuck over if it weren’t for me! What the fuck are you doing on the street? You’re an idiot and I should fine you right the fuck now!”

The mister picked this moment to stand up for himself because the amount of verbal abuse was becoming ridiculous. “I don’t want to die, so I stopped! You wanted me to get run over?!” he said, only to be dealt back this cute nugget of pep: “I wish you had been!!! Go the fuck home you fucking cholo!”

My dad correctly pointed out that if this was Canada, she would have been fired. Actually, he said: “if this was Canada, that cop would’ve been shot to the ground for what she did! She’d be fired, Robert!” I don’t know how Canada works in terms of this kind of offense, but I know for sure that other parts of the world don’t treat pedestrians as bad as they do here. Crossing these big avenues sometimes feels like a death wish, especially with public transportation as rampant as it is. Do you think I’ll want to walk to work when people who are supposed to protect and serve treat me like shit for wanting to save my own life?

Of course, there are two sides to every coin; I don’t mean about the mister in the story just now, because he had every right to rail on that dyke cop’s ass hairs. For every person that uses traffic signs correctly to get from point A to point B by way of walking, there are 3 idiots that let the Juega Vivo culture blind their common sense. It happens often that people get run over right next to elevated bridges built to avoid that sort of accident. Even though cab drivers can be fined for not accepting clients, people still ask to be taken to their destination instead of simply hopping in the back and say where they’re going, no matter what the circumstance. Public transportation unions do whatever the hell they want and no one stops them because no one, not even the government, stands up to them. Good ideas are shot down because the people don’t trust the government, so in their reasoning everything that comes out of there is lies and deceit. Everything done affects everything around, and as a result of all this, I don’t make a habit of walking anywhere because I value my life enough to not make such a fundamentally stupid decision as crossing the street during rush hour. The sad fact is, though, that even though it’s a bad idea, we are often forced to take those decisions and that, my esteemed reader, is the fundamental flaw.

Sometimes it seems that, in Panama, doing the right thing is actually the worst thing you can do.

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