Mexican Horror Story: life at 50km/h

Past December a new transit rule set was decreed for Mexico City, one of the biggest cities of the world and capital of the country.
Past December, also, all people had as little knowledge of the rules as we do of the hadron collider. The most important point, the one that was commented on the news was that there would be a speed limit of 50km/h. This is very little. A whooping 31 miles per hour means nothing in a city where the average resident travels 25~30km back and forth in order to work or study (and half of the way is a parking lot because of the traffic jams).

A while ago, a couple of days after the new regulation started working, I had to travel through one of the speedways of the city, Río Churubusco at about 1 am. It has to be noted that this road surrounds the center of the city without traffic lights, so is one of the best options to travel around Mexico. Also, this road has radars and cameras to automatically apply the corresponding speed tickets to whoever dares speed his way through. So, traveling so late, the road was deserted, but I couldn’t run more than 50 because of the cameras.

What happened then? Well, I tried to go at that speed on the leftmost lane, but the cars started passing me to the right and so I had to start going to slower lanes. At first I thought people was crazy going so fast (when going 50, 80 looks really fast), then I thought they just knew where the cameras were (I didn’t).

Everything changes under this conditions. It was nerve-wrecking and lovely at the same time. Nerve-wrecking because everybody outruns you, and the road seems way too long. I had to drive 25 kilometres and, instead of doing 15 minutes or so, I did half an hour. Before me I could see kilometres of clean soft road waiting to be run and I couldn’t. Watching the road with one eye and the speed meter with the other one.

This was lovely, however, because never before I saw my city from this point of view: driving slowly in the middle of the night from a road high above most the buildings. But the nerve wrecking experience still wins over my memory.

Now I know that the speed limit is 50 when there’s no indication otherwise. If there are signs of 80km/h, like there are in Churubusco, then your speed should be 80. Still, 50km/h is a bad idea almost everywhere, but do your homework and read the rules before playing.