I’ve touched on this topic before here and here, but I want to address this particular stain in Panama’s white dress; the public transportation system that we’ve had in place for the past 50 years is among the most terrible, disorganized cesspools of radioactive filth that the civilized world has ever known. We’re not as bad as India, mind you, but our transportation construct is so faulty in part because our zoning planification was done by hobos while being hocked up on Peyote and PCP for 6 days straight but also because of the transportation “unions” who are too dumb to move the service forward to a direction that would finally see the population’s best interests be put first instead of the blind belief that the service they’re providing is the best it can be. Of course, as it is with many other things concerning the common good of the Panamanian ruling over individual interests, this is all false.

What happens with transportation here is amazing; I’ve heard many a time that if you learn how to drive in Panama you can very much drive anywhere in the world… there are points in my daily commute behind the wheel that I feel I’m in a video game: must dodge vehicles, crapping birds and other assorted obstacles while I try to get to my destination past the insane afternoon traffic before my time runs out and have to insert another quarter in order to continue. I believe this is, in part, why Panamanians have such a shitty sense of time… so much so that we really don’t have that much of a preference regarding the time to make it to an appointment. The roads are so poorly laid out and there are so many cars in the city that people turn stupid, resulting in the execution of irrational behavior while at the wheel… but out of everyone, the ones who are reckless the most, those who are painfully batshit crazy while driving have got to be taxi and bus drivers… lets go over the suspects here, shall we?

First of all, we have the taxi cab drivers. Though they aren’t the main target of transportation-bashing, they’re very much part of the problem in how messed up our traffic system is. Don’t pay any attention to the official charts and polls you might read elsewhere because I see our reality day in and day out: there’s not a day that goes by where I don’t see an accident that went down in one of the main arteries of the city, and in 7 accidents I see in a week, 6 involve a taxi cab. There’s a government mandate that went through earlier in the year that would begin to organize these idiots in the sense of giving them their own color so they’re distinct from the other vehicles going down the street because up until that point anyone could turn their car into a cab; just had to get the “TAXI” light on the hood and off you went. Most of these drivers are reckless and irresponsible, dirty, foul-mouthed pervs that, even if they’re thoroughly amusing for me considering they tell some of the craziest stories I’ve ever heard) if I was a girl I’d feel really intimidated and even scared for my life… Panamanian girls know how to put their feet down and take care of themselves in such delightful situations but as my Canadians have learned the not-that-fun way, these cab drivers will take any opportunity they can get to coerce unsuspecting girls into whatever it is they want to to do them. That’s the part that irks me the most, personally… because the reckless driving is something Panamanians are accustomed to seeing and doing; it’s always a cutthroat traffic and things are in such a way that nobody can be polite on the wheel because everyone needs to be somewhere fast and it’s all just one big pain in the ass. Of course, half of them are running on that liquefied gas contraption that makes them ticking time bombs on wheels. Let’s not even get in on the neon lights, LCD screens and other assorted ride-pimping that just makes the cars look more ridiculous than they already are. Cab fares are cheap as hell, though. There was a time where my old car (R.I.P, Lazarus) had his carburetor shot to hell (it’s what would do him in eventually) and was put in a coma. I was going out with this girl who lived a good 15 minute drive away and let me tell you, 15 minutes going anywhere in Panama at any time between 8AM and 10PM is an ordeal of epic proportions. I liked her very much, so what would happen is that she’d pick me up at work or whatever and we’d hang out with friends or whatever, eventually ending up at her house and tip-toeing my ass out of there before her mom woke up at 5AM. Getting cabs in this particular spot of the city was almost impossible due to the fact that it was a closed-off residential area in the outskirts so the chances of me walking out at 4:30 AM and hailing a cab on the street while I put on my shoes was a little far-fetched so we resorted to calling cab services. It got to the point where my cell phone had the numbers of 5 different places that sent out these taxis and it was just a matter of me trying one after the other until I was patched through. Due to these late night adventures I learned that taxi cab fares increase during the 12 midnight - 4:30 hours; still, the deal was great considering that a cab would normally change around $1.50 for that trek on a regular time, when at that “gotta-go-home” hour I’d be charged around $1.75 - $2.00, usually. The stories these drivers would tell me where well worth the trip, too! Damn, those were awesome times.

The real meat of the issue here is with the bus drivers. This area of public transportation is a complete and utter mess: the service is not government-owned per sé, but the government entity in charge of transit commissions the permits for drivers and what not. From that point on is after businessmen to set up the service, routes and everything else… so, since businessmen want to save as much money as possible, they buy second-hand Datsun school buses from the United States, paint them, and send them to the streets to cover the routes. Each district has a talking head that is put in front of the news cameras to defend the colors but it’s frustrating to see these people struggle while they’re being bombarded with legitimate and pertinent questions they can’t answer in any other way that’s not passing on the blame to everyone else. There are bus drivers out there with over 200 outstanding traffic violations and they’re still driving buses, filling them up to the brim like they were sardine cans and revving the bitches up with their worn-out tires, over-juicing their car batteries and electricity with sound systems, TVs and DVD players and closing off the safety exits. Of course, the talking heads have responses to everything I’ve pointed out just now: TVs and DVD players are only for the bigger, cross-country buses. We can’t make passengers get off the bus once they’ve hopped on… and if we did ask them to, we’d have to charge more per person so we can break even. The worn-out tire buses are not from our route! The vehicles in our route are pristine… call their attention, instead!

I’m amazed none of these assholes has realized that if they’re all throwing the blame at each other then maybe all of them are the problem. Another scapegoat in this whole debacle seems to be the government, and these people’s approach to making them look like the bad guys is rather interesting…basically, they want to put fear in the populace by saying that if we let the government deal with it without their involvement they’ll just privatize the service and charge out the ass for it (we have a bad history with privatization. Our phone lines and power lines have both been privatized, having us pay a high price (both monetarily and spiritually) for it. The government recently changed the head of Traffic Authority and he said that he’d put all of these idiots in shape by November 27th. Of course, this announcement was said around November 6th or something ridiculous of the sort, making the endeavor somewhat impossible to accomplish… the intentions are there though and, despite the tight schedule, the transit authority has managed to pull out many faulty buses and drivers out of circulation, and they’re holding surprise checks on the buses that are still on the streets. The funny thing though is that even when the transit authority is doing its job the transport people keep complaining! They complain when they take away their licenses, their buses and such even though they don’t comply with the safety measures all buses should have.

Among the things required that I could gather were asked by the authority so that buses could circulate, some of them are:

1. A 25lb fire extinguisher: No brainer, right? Since the people in this business usually buy second-hand vehicles, none of them come with their respective fire extinguisher. What happens if there’s a fire while you’re riding the bus, then? Well, worst case scenario… this. (the link goes to an article in Spanish)
2. A hammer to break through the emergency exit windows: Talk about silly. If you have a freighter bus whose emergency exit consists of you breaking through some of the back windows, wouldn’t it be nice to have a hammer or something handy? You’d think that the owner/driver of the bus would have some common decency and provided one… you know, just in case something happens?
3. No worn-out tires: Fucking Christ. Yes, I know that each of those tires is worth a couple hundred dollars but if you invested thousands in some buses the least you could fucking do is put some decent tires on them. So, you know, no one dies in a horrible car crash or anything.
4. No sound/video systems installed anywhere in the bus (city buses): Because I was dying to see the outcome of that pirated copy of “The Fast and the Furious 7: Tricycle Gangsta’s” or whatever the hell. I don’t know about you, but when I’m in a bus all I’m thinking of is about getting to my destination in one piece, not dancing like I’m at a club or watching a movie. I’m busy enough looking over my shoulder so I don’t get mugged or shot to pay attention to the flick, anyway.
5. Bus drivers HAVE to have a clear record: You’d think that a businessman in his right mind would hire someone who has 100 traffic violations. The thing is that somehow every bus driver out there has at least 50, and they wear those on their sleeve with absolute pride. Which leads me to the next point…
6. NO reckless driving: Fat chance. In a country where no one respects traffic signs nor do they give anyone else chances (we’re offensive drivers by nature), bus drivers don’t seem to remember they’re operating second-tier vehicles with crappy tires and other discrepancies as they blaze through the streets, racing fellow bus drivers with their buses up to the gills filled with people. Of course, they don’t seem to mind if the buses are full of people while they go on their fucking race. School buses racing. Picture that at 2PM on a Tuesday afternoon.
7. No people standing while in the bus: As I said earlier, the government is trying to prevent accidents and I know people have to get to their jobs quickly and whatever but believe me when I tell you that seeing the footage of cramped up buses is downright unforgivable. They pack the buses so much that there’s definitely no comfort available for any of us people who just want to be taken to point B, wherever that may be.

There are many others, but you get the idea of how ridiculous this whole thing is. What’s even more baffling is how they’ll fight to the death for a position in the new revamp; they’re afraid that the President and the flock of monkeys in the legislature will approve some crazy resolution that will push the bus driver unions out of the equation. That’s fine, I suppose… no one wants to feel left out, but when they don’t approve the government’s initiative to establish other alternate modes of transportation they get even angrier, as if they were being insulted for anyone bringing up other modes of transportation that could very well turn out to be cooler and cheaper than the current system we have going for ourselves now. In the end, the unions like how they run things right now and they’re making it difficult for everyone to cause change. They only see themselves as the be-all/end-all of all things transportation and if that’s really the case then we’ll heard of many more cases dealing with murdering buses and their irresponsible drivers.

The day I can hop into a bus without fearing for my life, not being bossed around by the driver’s “secretary” about taking a seat while he collects the money and guards the door, harassed by some thug that wants to know what I have in my bag and remembering my P.E days as I have to jump and roll out of the bus when it passes through my stop since it will not stop… the day I can go in a bus, pay my fare and simply wait in peace for my stop to approach itself and then leave in peace, then I’ll believe that we’re making some progress regarding this crock of shit. Today is not that day. Today, traffic authority officials keep trying to clean up the transport system while the transport unions blame the users, the government, the roads and other fellow unions for the abortion that is our public transport system. Traffic in Panama is composed of nut jobs and in order to get to your destination you have to become a nut job yourself… it is evil, it’s what it is. Traffic in Panama is the devil on four wheels.

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