CLICK HERE FOR MORE STORIES

Testing And the Art of Driving on Mexican Roadways

by Thad­deus Tripp Ressler 
“Wait, what do you mean? There’s no test? All you need is ID?”
“Yes. This is Mex­i­co. We are free here. If you make an appoint­ment you can get in and out in fif­teen min­utes.”
 
Even though I had clar­i­fied what Gab­by, my host­ess, was say­ing, I wasn’t real­ly com­pre­hend­ing what I was hear­ing. My rule dic­tat­ed Amer­i­can brain could not accept the idea that you could get a gov­ern­ment issued driver’s license with­out ever hav­ing tak­en a writ­ten or road test. Sud­den­ly all the things I had seen start­ed falling into place in my brain. I thought about the wild-west lane changes, motor­cy­cles launch­ing them­selves across high­ways with­out even look­ing, and stop­lights that appar­ent­ly didn’t always mean stop. I thought about my father, laugh­ing­ly explain­ing that Domini­cans referred to speed bumps as “sleep­ing police­men,” when I told him about the ridicu­lous num­ber of speed bumps on all the roads here in Mex­i­co. Then sud­den­ly, I began to laugh from deep down in my soul, the whole notion was so ridicu­lous. That said, it’s easy to see the ridicu­lous­ness of anoth­er nation’s sys­tems with­out tak­ing our own into account.
Grow­ing up in New Jer­sey, a place where there is a rule, reg­u­la­tion, law, direc­tive, and tax on every­thing that a per­son does, it seems crazy that you wouldn’t need cer­ti­fi­ca­tion to dri­ve on pub­lic roads. Yet, those cer­ti­fi­ca­tions have nev­er stopped Amer­i­cans from being ter­ri­ble dri­vers. It does, how­ev­er, give us the com­fort­able illu­sion of safe­ty and com­pe­tence. And this is com­ing to you from some­one who has tra­versed the entire East Coast, all over the Mid­west, and South­west. I’ve also dri­ven most of the high­ways, byways, state, coun­ty, and sur­face roads of the three largest metrop­o­lis­es of the Unit­ed States, as well as a hand­ful of small­er ones too. I have dri­ven in thir­ty-eight of our fifty states, and I can say with absolute cer­tain­ty that the Unit­ed States has no short­age of hor­ren­dous dri­vers in it. Each and every­one of them went through “thor­ough” train­ing and test­ing. 
There are cer­tain cus­toms and cour­te­sies here in Mex­i­co that would seem strange to us in the Unit­ed States. For exam­ple, dri­ving on the shoul­der of a high­way in the US will, at the very least earn you a traf­fic stop and a tick­et. Here, it is com­mon cour­tesy to dri­ve on the shoul­der, so that peo­ple can pass. Not that a dou­ble yel­low line would slow a Mex­i­can dri­ver down nec­es­sar­i­ly, they appear to be more of a sug­ges­tion of a bound­ary than a hard and fast rule. Case in point, I was in a bus that passed a car, that was pass­ing anoth­er car, that was lazi­ly dri­ving halfway into the shoul­der. This was not on an emp­ty high­way either, there were cars com­ing from the oppo­site direc­tion, on the shoul­der, but still. That hap­pened on the bus ride I took from Puebla to Zacatlán on my way back from Oax­a­ca. It was one of a dozen moments on that trip that my breath caught in my throat, and my jaw went slack. 
On that trip I had opt­ed for a front row seat, think­ing this was going to be like the lux­u­ri­ous coach I had tak­en in the oppo­site direc­tion. It was not. More than that, the dri­ver was not the same relaxed gen­tle­man we had on the way to Puebla. This man drove like he had just stolen the bus and was try­ing to flee the coun­try in the most con­vo­lut­ed way pos­si­ble. Every turn felt like a test of my core strength. I avert­ed my eyes when he over­took vehi­cles, I braced for impact every time he came right up to the bumper of slow-mov­ing vehi­cles that hadn’t moved to the shoul­der fast enough. If I had pearls, they would have been clutched every time he took a turn that, by my esti­ma­tion, came far too close to oth­er vehi­cles or build­ings, which was lit­er­al­ly every sin­gle one of them. Yet, the man nev­er flinched, nev­er stopped, there were times that he didn’t even stop to let peo­ple jump on. Cucum­bers dream of being this cool. He was as sure in his move­ments as a sur­geon doing the rou­tine removal of a mole. The only thing that ever seemed to slow him down were the topes (pro­nounced TOE-pace), the Mex­i­can word for speed bumps. 
These “sleep­ing police­men”, are ubiq­ui­tous in Mex­i­co. The only place they don’t exist is on the high speed toll roads. The small­er the road the soon­er you can expect them. For instance on the one-way streets of Zacatlán, they come at least once per block. You can count on them pop­ping up least every kilo­me­ter on a big­ger road. They’ll stretch them out fur­ther in farm coun­try, where you most­ly get them at cross­ings or more pop­u­lat­ed areas. I even saw a cou­ple of them on dirt roads, which makes no sense to me. They vary in age, height, shape, and mark­ings. Some are a ser­pen­tine row of steel half-spheres cross­ing the road, some are eight inch wide asphalt rows with a slope so sharp it feels vin­dic­tive.  Oth­ers are tall and long enough to make a bus rock like a boat in stormy seas. To top it all off, the Mex­i­can gov­ern­ment doesn’t seem to val­ue the uni­ver­sal­i­ty or con­sis­ten­cy of road sig­nage. Nor do they seem to care if these topes have mark­ings on them that sig­ni­fy their pres­ence at all! On more than one occa­sion these unmarked topes afford­ed me an unex­pect­ed Span­ish les­son in the prop­er use of foul lan­guage.
I got to expe­ri­ence high­way topes on day one with Dick Davis, when we took a taxi from Mex­i­co City to Zacatlán. There must have been at least a hun­dred of them in the three hour dri­ve. Appar­ent­ly there aren’t as many of them in Mex­i­co City, because it seemed like our cabby’s first expe­ri­ence with them too. Many of them were hit at speeds well in excess of what his lit­tle car’s sus­pen­sion could han­dle. Each one earned a qui­et curse and/or grunt from all three of us. In one case, Dick and I hit the roof of the cab with enough force to stun us and make us slide deep down into our seats for fear that it might hap­pen again. 
Lying in bed in Oax­a­ca, weeks lat­er, I was try­ing to fig­ure out how I could make sense of all of this, espe­cial­ly those damn topes. I thought about the fact that Mex­i­co is a coun­try that enjoys its drink­ing, a lot, and their dri­vers don’t go through test­ing. My mind reeled at the idea that swear­ing to a gov­ern­ment offi­cial that you know how to dri­ve, plus a birth cer­tifi­cate and proof of address, was all that was nec­es­sary to get a driver’s license. From that angle though, all those topes start­ed to make a lit­tle more sense to me. It’s hard to cause a mas­sive car wreck when you can’t get over 35mph. Could you, sure, but it had to lim­it the pos­si­bil­i­ty tremen­dous­ly. Hell, I’d be will­ing to bet that most of the drunk dri­ving acci­dents are caused by very short peo­ple, because as Dick and I can attest, smack­ing your head into the roof of a car is a sober­ing expe­ri­ence.
The fun­ny thing is that in the month and change that I’ve been here, I’ve only seen one acci­dent, and it was a minor one that didn’t even bend a fend­er. Every­one, except the cab­bies and bus dri­vers, seem to dri­ve very defen­sive­ly. At inter­sec­tions they’re all very cour­te­ous, and on the high­ways they’re con­stant­ly mov­ing out of the way and pay­ing atten­tion to who’s ahead and behind. Are there crazy dri­vers and bad dri­vers, of course, but I don’t think I’ve seen any­thing here that was all that cra­zier than in the Unit­ed States. 
I myself have been the crazy dri­ver. When I was liv­ing in Los Ange­les, I drove on the free­ways like I was try­ing to evade hit­men in a Hol­ly­wood movie. I’ve seen hor­rif­ic acci­dents, reck­less dri­ving, and just plain stu­pid­i­ty. So then, does hav­ing a license that came with a learn­ers per­mit, train­ing, and test­ing make us any bet­ter, or at least bet­ter dri­vers? I don’t know the answer to that. I will say this though, that crazy bus dri­ver got us into Zacatlán thir­ty min­utes ahead of sched­ule, with­out a sin­gle scratch. On a day that I spent eight hours on a bus, I appre­ci­at­ed that. Although, next time I might opt for a seat some­where in the mid­dle of the bus, a seat-belt, and an eye mask. 
 
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________