The Dominican and their trauma with traffic: why aren't we making progress?

Traffic in the Dominican Republic is not a problem. It's a national trauma. One that accompanies us from the moment we leave home until we manage to return alive.

It doesn't matter if you drive, walk, or use public transport, here we are all victims (and, many times, accomplices) of a sick road culture, in which laws are optional, courtesy is a rarity, and disorder is the norm.


How many more lives will be lost before we understand that it is not normal for a country of less than 11 million inhabitants (poorly counted) to have one of the highest traffic accident death rates in the world? Why does urban mobility continue to depend more on individual will than on a well-thought-out collective system?

What we experience on Dominican streets is not only the result of insufficient infrastructure, but of a disordered mentality, which prioritizes the immediate over the correct.

Here, motorcyclists go in the opposite direction "just because", public cars and "voladoras" stop in the middle of the street, avenue or at the foot of the elevated without prior notice, and pedestrians cross wherever they please - all under the indifferent gaze of an authority that is often part of the same chaos. But the owners of private vehicles are just as bad or worse.

We have built a relationship with traffic based on distrust and the law of the strongest. The right of way is not yielded because it is feared that the other will take advantage of it. The pedestrian is not respected because "he got in the way himself". The signals are not followed because, deep down, no one believes that there are real consequences. The stops of motorcycle taxis or the concho routes of the "owners of the country" are set up on every corner without regulation, and that is shown even in the number of undocumented Haitians who today move in two and four wheels (how do they acquire those vehicles?)

Traffic lights don't command; they suggest. Traffic agents don't regulate; they improvise. And road education continues to be an invisible subject in schools, when it should be as essential as reading or writing.

Dealers, workshops, schools, restaurants, shops and all kinds of businesses take over the streets as if they were an extension of them.

But the most worrying thing is that we have normalized road violence. We insult, push, honk like crazy, as if that solved anything, and we applaud the one who "cut in line" because "the smart one lives off the fool".

Meanwhile, millions of pesos are invested in cosmetic solutions - applications, operations, beautiful campaigns - without attacking the structural problem. No matter how many elevated roads, metro lines or cable cars, if there is an uninformed citizenry, a weak institutional framework and an absolute lack of real consequences for those who violate the law, everything will be in vain.

How long will we continue to be trapped in this vicious circle of chaos, which takes lives, generates stress, pollutes and takes away our time every day?

The solution to traffic is not just changing the direction of streets, painting lines or putting up speed bumps. It is a matter of civic culture, of deep education, of institutional leadership and of a firm will that, until now, seems to be stuck in a mental traffic jam.