Monday there was a Mexico-wide public bus strike. Apparently this is the second one, but the first was Veracruz buses only, and this time the rest of the country joined AND a good helping of taxi drivers backed them up. You see, all the gas stations here are owned by the government, and with the crazy climbing of gas prices the president declared a gas price freeze. But he didn’t freeze diesel, which all the buses use, and it has continued to go up. So the bus drivers want him to give them a price freeze, too, and nobody seems to think that’s going to happen. Considering the strike was two days ago and el presidente has kept mum they’re probably right.

The bus system here is very odd, and I think most of it has a causal relationship with this little tidbit: the bus drivers are not salaried or paid by the hour. For each passenger they pick up they earn 1 peso of the fare.

So. . .

• you can pay with whatever small bills or coins you have and they’ll give you change while they drive
• you can catch a bus from pretty much anywhere–just stick out your arm
• you can get off the bus pretty much anywhere–just ask him to stop
• you may end up going in circles (literally) in high pedestrian traffic areas so the driver can pick up more passengers along the same route
• when there’s traffic you will get to see parts of the city you wouldn’t otherwise because the driver will take all kinds of crazy detours to get out of the jam, often unsuccessfully
• you are likely to routinely think “oh my god we are all going to die” due to the speed, swerving, and attempts to pass vehicles the driver deems slow

Today on the bus I swear our driver was racing with the bus driver next to us. We had two lanes going one way and the road narrowed to one and each wanted to get in front. I looked out the (open) window while this was happening and I swear at a couple points the adjacent bus was only 4 inches away from us, while going like 50 mph in a rickety old school bus. Definitely an “OMGWAAGTD” moment.

***Bonus bus fact! The vehicles themselves are either old tour buses with plush seating or school bus style, all have various kinds of manual transmissions, some with giant weird contraptions. But the yellow ones, oh HO the yellow ones, they are air conditioned and cost 1.50 pesos more. I have only ridden in one once because apparently I’ve already adopted the local mentality that my comfort is not worth 10 cents.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 at 9:16 pm and is filed under Blogroll, Veracruz. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.