The Traffic War, an Addendum

This morning's Clarín contains an article on four-wheel ATVs in the Buenos Aires province beach resort of Pinamar, where an ordinance does not allow such unstable vehicles to circulate on city streets but only on designated circuits. Leaving aside the question of how many helpless sunbathers they might run over on the beach, only one person may ride each vehicle and that person must wear a helmet. The article's accompanying photo, though, shows a helmetless driver, with a bareheaded boy on his lap, on a heavily trafficked avenue.

After being cited by a municipal inspector for having no vehicle registration or license , and his helmet hanging on his elbow, one indignant rider responded that "I'm on vacation, man, and all you do is hassle me." With 8,000 ATVs for rent in Pinamar, and only 30 inspectors, the overwhelming majority of violations go unpunished. In fact, ATV companies even rent to minors, though the the provincial traffic code prohibits this.

The Traffic War in Argentina

Several years ago, one Buenos Aires daily described Argentina's highways as the theater of a "Guerra del Tránsito" (Traffic War). Editorial writers regularly deplore the slaughter on the country's roads, and 2007 statistics suggest there's been no cease-fire. According to the daily Clarín, more than 8,000 people died in traffic accidents here last year, and the death rate of 28.5 per 100,000 inhabitants was higher than every other country in the hemisphere except for Mexico (28.9 per 100,000). By way of comparison (or rather, contrast), consider the figures for Brazil (18.5), Uruguay (17.2), the United States (15.0), and Chile (13.1).

Most local analyses, though, tend to place the blame on infrastructural or technical problems such as lack of freeways or the presence of older and unsafe vehicles. They're not wrong per se: narrow two-lane roads (many of them poorly maintained) can be dangerous, and I've seen vehicles with neither headlights nor taillights puttering along them.

(Lack of) Law Enforcement
Those analyses, though, regularly ignore an apparently uncontrollable epidemic of reckless, aggressive driving, and an almost total lack of professional law enforcement. It would be unfair to say that all Argentines drive badly, but enough of them do so that driving here can be an anxiety-filled experience: high-speed tailgating is rampant, for instance, and almost everybody ignores no-passing stripes. The police, meanwhile, rarely patrol the highways: in all my years, I can count the number of cars I've seen actually patrolling on one hand, and I've never seen anybody stopped for a moving violation.

The police do, though, set up checkpoints at key highway junctions. On occasion, they may detain a drinking driver, but more often they engage in meticulous document checks and uncover minor equipment defects--say, a malfunctioning blinker--that they see as opportunities for coimas (bribes). The Buenos Aires provincial police are notorious for this.

Motorcycle Madness
Motorcyclists are an issue in their own right. In theory, there's a national helmet law; in practice, I estimate compliance at about 10 percent. Among those who have helmets, more than a few carry them on their elbows--raising questions about the size and location of their brains (then again, perhaps the law only requires them to wear helmets, without specifying where). Yesterday a friend sardonically suggested that the only motorcyclists who wear helmets are motochorros--purse-snatching thieves who can't be identified as they escape on their bikes.

To my mind, though, the greatest concern is small children. It's not unusual, especially in poor northern provinces such as Catamarca and La Rioja, to see a helmetless family with two infants on an underpowered scooter--a multiple fatality-in-waiting should they lose their balance and fall in front of a passing car.

Foot Soldiers
Meanwhile, and especially in the city of Buenos Aires, pedestrians are second-class citizens. In fact, my usual advice to visitors is to realize that, as a pedestrian, you are invisible--if you doubt that, just try to make eye contact with any porteño driver. Other things being equal, motorists may prefer not to collide with another vehicle, but they appear utterly unconcerned about flattening a pedestrian. At crosswalks, even at the handful that have been touched up in the last several decades, intimidated pedestrians wait nervously until all vehicles have passed. Once, when I asked a city policeman if he ever stopped and ticketed vehicles that sped through crosswalks, his snarling response was "That's not my job!"

On the other hand, jaywalking is epidemic. My theory is that, since motorists almost universally disregard foot traffic, able pedestrians cross wherever and whenever there's an opening, at the corner or midblock, with or against the signal, even on the 12-lane nightmare that is Avenida del Libertador.

That said, in nearly 20 years of driving in Argentina, with more than 200,000 kilometers on various odometers, I've successfully avoided any traffic accident, though I've had some close calls. As a pedestrian (for what it's worth, I don't drive in Buenos Aires proper), I've also managed to avoid becoming a statistic in the traffic war.

Llaima Update Redux

Tom Buschor tells me that Llaima is quiet, but the park itself is closed for the time being. He's had some drop-in guests because of the eruption.

Llaima Update

According to Tom Buschor, proprietor of the Suizandina guest house at Malalcahuello, only about 35 km northeast of Llaima, the volcano has calmed down considerably. Tom has posted some photos of the eruption, as seen from his property, at the Suizandina website (www.suizandina.com).

There remains, though, some concern that snowmelt associated with the eruption could cause flooding. The Río Captrén, a tributary of the much larger Cautín north of the park, seems most at risk. Border crossings to Argentina, at Icalma and Pino Hachado, have seen little ashfall and remain open.

According to Buenos Aires's Volcanic Ash Advisory Center (VAAC), Llaima's ash plume at one point reached an altitude of about 12.5 km (about 41,000 feet) above sea level.

Buenos Aires Buses, Subways, and Trains

It's always easiest to take unpopular actions at a time when people are distracted by other priorities. Thus public transportation prices in Buenos Aires are going up for the first time since December 2000, a year before the Argentine political and economic meltdown of 2001-2. Prices for a single trip on the Subte (Underground) will increase from 70 to 90 centavos, while basic bus fares will go from 75 to 90 centavos and suburban rail fares will go from 50-55 centavos to 60-65 centavos. Since most Porteños (residents of BA) take their vacations in January, there's likely to be little protest in a city that's known for its protests.

That said, by almost any standard, public transportation here is extremely cheap. The Subte fare, for instance, is now about 29 US cents, while a comparable fare in the Chilean capital of Santiago is nearly three times higher, at about 84 US cents. It's also frequent and abundant; while the Subte closes around 11 p.m., buses run all night and, even at 3 or 4 a.m., it's rare to have to wait more than 10 or 15 minutes. City streets can be slow at peak hours, though, and many passengers have to ride standing up at those times (so do Subte riders, for that matter).

Meanwhile, we had our first power outage of the summer today, as temperatures rose above 35° C (about 95° F), but it lasted only about an hour. It's supposed to rain tomorrow, and Friday should be cooler. Meanwhile, I'm heading out to buy ice cream, as BA has some of the world's best.

In fact, as I headed to the corner for ice cream, it had already started raining, with lightning but no thunder, at around 9 p.m. local time. It would be great to have rain all night and a cool fresh morning.

Llaima Erupts

The first details are sketchy, but Chile's Volcán Llaima, east of the city of Temuco and about 700 km south of Santiago, has begun to erupt. In the Conguillío National Park, Llaima's lava flow has cut the road from the park headquarters to the north side town of Curacautín and may have reached Laguna Captrén. About 150 tourists have been evacuated, but emergency officials have so far classified this as a yellow alert, one step below the maximum red alert.

According to the Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program, Llaima is one of Chile's largest and most active volcanoes. "Frequent moderate explosive eruptions with occasional lava flows have been recorded since the 17th century," so this eruption seems to be no cause for panic. In the short term, though, it's probably advisable for intending visitors to postpone trips to the park and its immediate vicinity.

Across the border, in Argentina's Neuquén province, westerly winds have carried enough ash from Llaima that Aerolíneas Argentinas postponed flights from the airport at the city of Neuquén.

Patagonian Paleontology

Paleontology, particularly dinosaur studies in Patagonia, is a field in which Argentines scholars have excelled in recent years. Much of the country was, in remote times, home to some of the world's greatest dinosaur specimens, and museums both in Buenos Aires and the provinces are doing an excellent job of communicating their findings to the public.

Over the last few days, I've been reading Walking on Eggs (New York, Scribner's, 2001), by Luis Chiappe and Lowell Dingus, about their discovery of huge caches of dinosaur eggs in Neuquén province. Even more importantly, they discovered dinosaur embryos within those caches, which provided even greater clues as to dinosaur evolution. Without going into great detail at this point, I'll add that Dingus and Chiappe (an Argentine who is head of the Dinosaur Institute at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History) have written a book that manages to communicate their findings with enthusiasm in accessible language.

I'll also add that that I had the good fortune to meet Chiappe several years ago, briefly, as he was doing a dig in Sierra de las Quijadas National Park in San Luis province (an area that resembles the canyonlands of Utah). He was very approachable, more than willing to take time to answer what, for him, must have been extremely basic questions about his work there.

Buenos Aires Explodes

Many years ago, as I was growing up in Tacoma, Washington, I lived barely a block from the Fort Lewis army base. In fact, I lived near the little used portion known as North Fort Lewis where, on occasion, GIs went on training exercises. As kids, my friends and I used to explore the woods there and, often finding foxholes, we would pretend we were soldiers. Often we would find items, such as ammunition boxes, that we would take home as souvenirs. Once I found an M-80 firecracker, used by the U.S. Army to simulate battlefield explosions, but illegal for civilians since 1966.

The M-80 is a cylindrical firecracker about 1.5 inches long and just over half an inch wide, with its fuse coming out the side rather than the end. Most of the fuse on mine had already burned but, when I brought it home, I decided to set it off in the back yard (my parents were not home). At least I was not so foolish as to light it while it was in my hand--even more clueless adolescents have lost fingers or hands from M-80s--but when it went off I was barely a few feet away; the explosion was powerful and the noise was deafening. In was so loud, in fact, I was surprised the police or fire department didn't come; since then, I've been very wary of fireworks.

In Buenos Aires, my wife and I own an apartment in a sedate middle class neighborhood near the botanical gardens and the zoo. Last night, though, was New Year's Eve and, at midnight, explosions far stronger than anything I recall from my own M-80 went on for at least an hour; in corridors between tall apartment buildings, the effect mimics a war zone. In reality, Argentina's unregulated fireworks market probably brings explosives far more powerful than the M-80 into the hands of adolescents (and others) with impaired judgment (not necessarily caused by consumption of alcohol or other mind-altering substances).

Having seen firecrackers tossed from ninth-floor apartment balconies into the street, I no longer leave home on New Year's Eve when I am in BA--it's just not safe, in my opinion. On Christmas, some 75 people, most of them under age 15, were admitted to Greater Buenos Aires hospitals with fireworks injuries. The photograph that accompanies this blog entry, of a poster that appeared on city streets at year's end, at least shows that the Justice, Security and Human Rights Ministry recognizes the problem--it implores people not to purchase fireworks, and to report illegal fireworks, even if no one appears interested in impeding their manufacture and sale.

An update as of early afternoon: according to the daily newspaper La Nación, 82 persons have sought treatment in city hospitals today for injuries relating to fireworks--and uncorking champagne bottles. More than half sought burn treatments, while others had bruises and eye injuries, but none of either was apparently considered serious. Thus the city proper seems to have gotten off lightly, though there's no word from Greater Buenos Aires, the provincial suburbs beyond the capital's boundary.