This is a very cool system to cut down on rush hour traffic. License plates here go with the cars–when the car is sold, the plate stays. So, according to the last number on your license plate, every private vehicle is prohibited from being on the road in the morning and evening rush hours two days per week. For example, if your plate ends in 6, you can’t drive between 6:00 and 9:00 AM and 4:00 and 7:00 PM on Mondays and Wednesdays. This is for a year, and the following year the days are rotated to two others.
So, what do you do?? Well, if you are rich and want to avoid the spirit of the law, you buy more? cars with different plate numbers. But if not, you take public transportation, or go to work early or late, or leave work early or late, or carpool, or work from home, or think of some other way to deal with the situation. But what you DON’T DO is drive your car during rush hour.
The overall effect of this is to thin out the rush hour, which is good, because even the thinner rush hour is pretty thick. Then at 7:00PM there’s ANOTHER rush hour created by the folks that stayed off the road during pico y placa, and now have somewhere to get to.? The city is committed to the idea that the solutions to traffic problems DO NOT lie in building more and bigger roads, but in changing people’s habits and encouraging them to come up with other ways. I’ve heard that the eventual plan is to eventually eliminate private transportation entirely during rush hours. It’s hard to imagine that the wealthy classes will put up with that idea, but it’s a good goal.
Oh, pico y placa, by the way, means “the beak and the plate.” A friend explained the logic to me: think of the last number of the plate as the point, or the beak, of a bird.
This is one of the examples of a country that is supposedly so far behind the US is actually being more progressive. A system like this would make a huge difference in the traffic problems in most of the big US cities, but I think our individualism would never allow it. We are so used to being able to do whatever we want that we can afford, and to not having the government tell us what to do, even though it is good for the society, that there’s no chance of something like this ever taking effect there. But it sure would be refreshing to see Americans start to think globally a little bit.
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