QCOSTARICA – The Ministerio de Obras Públicas y Transporte (Ministry of Public Works and Transport- MOPT) shared through social networks, some photographs showing how “some people insist on risking their life and that of drivers so as not to walk a little further, using a pedestration overpass; dodging vehicles instead. ”
The photographs were taken at the pedestrian overpass located in La Sabana, in front of the by the Contraloría General de la República (Comptroller General) building Friday morning, showing how the irresponsibility of some pedestrians.
The “responsible” pedestrians (green dots) use the overpass to get to the other side, meanwhile, the “irresponsible” (red dots) dash acros four lanes of the busy divided highway.
Several weeks ago the the Road Safety Council (Consejo de Seguridad Vial – Cosevi), in conjunction with the State telecom, Kolbi, launched a campaign to give responsible pedestrations using overpasses five minutes of free calls.
In the campaign, pedestrians using an overpass have to look for a Kolbi sign and send a text message, identifying themselves and they will be credited 5 minutes of call time.
However, it seems that the proposal is not tempting for some.
The fine for not using a pedestrian overpass is ¢21,963 colones.
Sort of says it all about the mentality at MOPT. Instead of drawing the conclusion that would be obvious from a similar failure rate for motor-vehicle oriented infrastruction, namely that the engineering experiment didn’t work and a different solution has to be found, MOPT resorts to blaming the “irresponsible” pedestrians. This kind of victim-blaming crusade would be be regarded as an irrresponsibly stupid engineering practice if directed at motorists, but when directed at pedestrians, MOPT gets away with it.
Indeed, forget what MOPT purports to show in these photos and look at what is shown. What is shown is another neighborhood largely destroyed by MOPT’s single-minded devotion to motor vehicle transportation. It’s no accident that Sabana Sur is now a high-crime area, or that the park itself is increasingly a magnet for thugs; this could and should have been predicted by the policymakers who approved MOPT’s anti-pedestrian highway.
Costa Rica needs better transportation engineering than it gets out of MOPT, and it’s not as if better transportation engineering is unknown. Other countries practice it.
But not MOPT. It thinks of transportation engineering as providing only for the 25% of the population that drives, and then faults the pedestrians killed by the motor vehicles for their own deaths.