MEXICO CITY — Two or three mornings a week, I get the day started with a shot of adrenaline and vehicular aggression coursing through my veins.
Who needs caffeine when you have vintage Volkswagens coming at you the wrong way?
Cement trucks running red lights, unlicensed bus drivers and traffic circles where a Darwinian, survival-of-the-rudest logic prevails: I fight them all just to get my daughter to preschool, a harrowing drive of 1.3 miles.
Last year, more new cars were sold in Mexico than ever before: 1.2 million. In Mexico City, my minivan is one of about 6 million cars, taxis, buses and other vehicles, carrying 29 million people, that hit the streets every day.
The city traffic grid, first laid out by the Aztecs, is a patched-together series of compromises with Mexico City's tumultuous history. By every measure, traffic is worse here than it's ever been, despite the heroic efforts of a small cadre of traffic engineers who struggle to keep things moving.
"Everyone wants to be in the same place at the same time," says Alejandro Hernandez Garcia, the official in charge of monitoring the grid. "People don't respect the traffic signs. They don't respect the traffic lights, either, especially at night."
The average Mexico City resident commutes nearly four hours each day. A recent and disturbing phenomenon has people commuting to Mexico City from the city of Puebla, 90 miles and three hours away.
Traffic is so bad here, and driver behavior so out of control, that city officials are considering reinstating driving tests. Draconian fines soon will be implemented against such everyday sins as going the wrong way on a one-way street.
It's the huge numbers and the lack of space that force everyone who drives here to routinely be a jerk -- this scribe no exception. My fellow drivers and I double-park, we cut each other off, we make right turns from the left lane.
The locals rarely complain. There is no phrase in Mexican Spanish equivalent to "road rage."
To drive in Mexico City, I've had to forget almost everything I learned in California.
Slowly, I'm learning how to drive like a chilango -- that's what residents of Mexico City call themselves.
To drive in this city you must be at once aggressive and patient. You ease your car into the next lane and force other drivers to let you in, because otherwise you'll never get where you're going. When someone cuts you off, you just let it go.
You must learn to surrender yourself to the traffic gods, who are, on most days, exceedingly angry with us poor sinners down here in the Valley of Mexico.
"At the beginning, you fight it, you're angry with everybody. But if you have that attitude, you don't last," says Elias Nunez, a veteran taxi driver in the Polanco neighborhood who drives me home one day. (In an effort to preserve my sanity, I don't drive to work.)
"Sometimes, the traffic gets like this," Nunez says, taking his two hands and weaving his fingers together. "And no one can move."
Ah, yes, I say. We have a word for that in English: gridlock.
It's another one of those Americanisms I think is untranslatable, until I meet Alfredo Hernandez Garcia.
A complicated problem \o7
\f7Hernandez Garcia is the man in charge of preventing \o7carros atrapados\f7, or trapped cars. He works in a bunker-like office in a nondescript building of the Public Security Secretariat, Mexico City's police force.
A graduate of the country's only university program in traffic engineering, he is a man uniquely prepared for a job best described as mitigating failure.
"It gets complex, very complicated," he says. It's a word he uses a lot to describe the traffic: \o7complicado.\f7
As he talks, he looks distractedly at a live screen image transmitted by one of 300 cameras trained on traffic. This one shows his biggest headache, the "Periferico," or Peripheral Highway, which circles the city, although it long ago was encircled by more city. At 1:42 p.m., four hours before rush hour, traffic on the Peri has come to a halt.
"It's totally paralyzed," I observe, pointing at the screen. "Those cars are trapped."
"Yes," he says with a frown. He gets on the phone and a short while later tells me, "A truck got stuck. We've sent a tow truck to clear it."
It isn't just broken-down cars that make the traffic \o7complicado\f7, he says. People deliberately try to tangle things up. Several times a month one protest or another blocks a key artery, upsetting the delicate balance that keeps traffic bearable, but still bad.
Last year, Hernandez Garcia says, a single political protest caused a backup involving half a million vehicles.
He attacked the problem with helicopters, tow trucks, traffic cops on motorcycles and computer-controlled traffic signals. He got into a helicopter himself, commanding his troops from the sky.
"It took us three hours to sort that one out," Hernandez Garcia says. "That was a hard day."
