As a follow up from yesterday’s article I would like to bring a certain issue to your attention, just for commenting or considering. Although the car plates restriction was implemented in Costa Rica as one of the solutions to save gasoline, the owners of different companies are stating that they are actually spending more money on it.

 

Small companies that own only one or two cars are actually losing money since they cannot complete routes or make them anyways and get tickets for not complying with the restriction. In Costa Rica, economy is some sort of conjunction between a lot of different factors and small companies are a huge part of it, since there are so many. Big companies, such as Florida Ice and Farm (Coca Cola Co.) are also stating that although they have many trucks, arranging routes to follow the restrictions has become a very expensive issue.

 

Come to think about it, Costa Rica is in fact a small country, meaning that although the restrictions considers only the “Casco Metropolitano”, the majority of the people need to drive by this area no matter what to get to their jobs, schools, etc; there is no way to go around it and those who can o want to adventure themselves trying, end up spending twice o thrice as much money in gas, not to mention the condition the Costa Rica roads are in. At this moment and after reading about all these issues I cannot help but think that maybe, the restriction solution has worked for other countries, bigger countries and Costa Rica may be too small for this. As I have explained before, in Costa Rica, transportation is not well settled, neighbor towns cannot be connected by any bus route in some cases and people are obligated to go all the way to San Jose downtown only to come back to get to the next town. In Guanacaste, most people drive, yet there isn’t as much traffic as there is in San Jose.

 

Another big issue, has been the public transportation: bus drivers are demanding a raise on their prices to pay for gas, yet more and more people need to use buses to get to work and public transportation in Costa Rica was never set up for the increase of users: people are left behind I bus stops because they can’t get into the bus. The train could be the most reasonable solution yet the schedules set up can’t cover the high demand. I wonder how the Costa Rica government is dealing with this matter. If you ask me, instead of trying to convince people to move downtown, they should be encouraging people to move outside of San Jose. I live in Guanacaste and have the exact same facilities that people have in San Jose; Costa Rica is just not arranged properly in my opinion.

 

Real estate in Costa Rica is big and if the government would only provide more opportunities and chances for people to relocate outside of the capital, maybe a driving restriction that makes companies lose money won’t be necessary.