Santo Domingo traffic compares only with poorest Africa

Santo Domingo.-  Greater Santo Domingo mobilizes 3.5 million people daily, but 2.5 million of those use a public transport considered among Latin America’s worst, compared only to the poorest countries in Africa.

The figures are from the recent study “Public Transport and Urban Mobility in Greater Santo Domingo: Challenges of a Social Policy for Inclusion and Equity,” by the Social Policies and Development Observatory of Dominican Republic’s Vice Presidency.

“Urban public transport in Greater Santo Domingo is one of the worst in Latin America and can only be compared to some of the poorest countries in Africa. Chaos predominates in the streets and logjams in avenues because of the large number of private cars; Public transport is mostly carried out on buses and cars in unsuitable conditions,” the report says.

There’re also frequent violations of traffic laws, which has placed the nation among the first in traffic accident deaths in the world.

The document cites the study by Dorrejo, Negrín and Pérez (2007), which states: “In the National District there are 842,621 movements reported to date, while in Santo Domingo province this figure amounts to 1.7 million; If we add these amounts we can deduce that in the metropolitan area of Greater Santo Domingo more than 2.5 million trips are realized every day,” the document said.

It adds that the movements are made under “inhospitable conditions, with rickety vehicles and in bad conditions in some cases, producing enormous expenses in terms of pollution, in accidents resulting from reckless driving and deteriorating the conditions of displacement.”