Old stuff scanned and put on the web. This one from 1997.
AT FIRST I thought it was a paradox. Travel in Mexico is either dogged by the manana mentality with endless delay or it is done at break-neck speed risking life and limb.
Travelling north-west from Mexico City to Baja California with my brother I started to make notes for an article about appalling Mexican drivers, rabid with Latin machismo, and how even Canberra drivers were safety-conscious paragons by comparison.
Why the hurry, I thought. Most of the time Mexicans have a manana attitude — manana meaning it will get done later, tomorrow or some indeterminate time in the future. Why couldn’t that attitude pervade driving; it would be much safer and less strain on the nerves?
But then it dawned on me that it is precisely because you wait for hours until some bureaucrat stamps something or a cop searches or for roadworks or heavy traffic allow progress that when you get the chance to go, you go as fast as you can.
The consequences are horrific. On the side of the road at nearly every corner, crest and crossroad will be a memorial, or two or three, to the victims of road accidents. All are permanent and most are elaborate. White-washed crosses and crucifixes on plinths are plain to see.
But they are as much deterrent as the public hangings in the early nineteenth century when pick-pockets worked the crowd at the hangings of other pick-pockets. Cars pass trucks on corners and crests adorned with the crosses marking the earlier killing of earlier drivers for doing precisely the same thing.
Why don’t they learn from others’ mistakes, I thought, arrogantly. Mexico has an appalling road toll. It has about the same number of motor vehicles as Australia, but two and a half times the death rate.
In 1993 (the latest figure I can get) 5252 people were killed and 35,460 injured. In Australia, the figure is 1953 dead and about 22,000 injured.
Small wonder, the way I saw them drive, I thought.
No-one turned their lights on at dusk. Most trucks had lights and indicators missing. Over-loading was chronic. The backs of utilities (or pick-ups) were stacked with young men. I counted 23 in one, though the photo I snapped shows only the back 16 of them. Shortly afterwards we came to a sharp bend before a huge rock face literally plastered with memorial crosses.
Cops seemed oblivious to people travelling at 140km/h in a 110km/h zone.
“”Why don’t those cops book some of those drivers?” I asked my brother. Before he could answer I put my hands over my eyes and screamed, “”Look out, you’ll kill us both. I don’t want to die in a Mexican ditch where there’s no-one even to put a cross up for me. We missed that car by centimetres.”
He was as mad as they were. How had he survived two years in Mexico?
Then it was my turn to drive. And I got some answers. It’s the economy stupid.
Trucks are over-laden because people have to get the maximum from their petrol costs.
Trucks are slow because they are overladen and old. Mexico has a much higher truck-to-car ratio than Australia and they clog the roads. Moreover Mexico has about less than half the total length of road than Australia and a much lower percentage of national highway and main roads for the same number of vehicles. Less dual carriageway and more crosses.
The bureaucracy including the police is dogged with paper systems and lower computerisation and technology. They cannot catch speedsters efficiently with radar and speed cameras and enforce the fines with a court system. Corruption is rife among traffic cops because they can get away with it.
And more people are killed because the hospital and ambulance systems are poorer. (One in eight road trauma cases is a death in Mexico compared to one in 11 in Australia.)
The truck ahead was spewing straw and dust. I had been following it at 25km/h for several kilometres developing Hull’s Theory of the Economic Sources of Automotive Risk-Taking.
“”Get on with it,” said my brother. His tolerance was wearing thin and, now it was drawn to my attention, so was mine.
Before long I found my Walter Mitty driving transmogrified to that of Mad Max, flattening my brother’s powerful V6 into the face of on-coming traffic a couple of hundred metres away. It surged from 25km/h to 135km/h in seconds then decelerated just as violently to squeeze behind the next dawdling truck. Phew, that was close.
“”You had plenty of space,” said my brother.
Risky driving has nothing to do with machismo or the Mexican nature. It has to do with human nature responding to economic and social conditions. You take more risks because the time saved is greater on a road system with no passing lanes and very slow trucks.
And others expect it. Mexican drivers are polite in an exasperated sort of way.
At least that’s what I thought as I later hurtled past three trucks at 140km/h and stared into the nonchalant face of the on-coming driver who had slowed to avoid a collision.
Risk-taking is not an especially Mexican trait, but a human one in those conditions. At 140km/h on the wrong side of the road, I terrified myself at the thought of it.
CRISPIN HULL
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times in 1997