Viejo Gringo Reports #3: Endurance Contest

 Traffic in Peru

Traffic in Peru could be called orderly chaos.  I have seen no accidents, no pedestrian injuries, no arguments or road rage. Everyone tries to cooperate, yet also intimidate each other. A passive driver will not last long. Vehicles operate by inches. Stop signs are ignored.  Any parking restrictions are ignored. Speed limits are ignored.  Tuk Tuk’s and bicycles are edged off the roads.  Vehicles will pass coming up to a blind corner on a road.  Traffic lights are rare so intersections are traffic snarls.  Community dogs wander the streets in smaller towns, along with children and domestic animals like turkeys and bulls. Cars, trucks, buses, taxis, tuk tuks, scooters and motorcycles have the right of way over pedestrians.  For a pedestrian to cross a street in city traffic, they must use a vehicle as a shield.  Gringos on foot who expect to be ‘respected’ learn quickly.  You better run. 

Lima Peru traffic on a big road

Yet as the saying goes, live by the car, die by the car. The roads and streets are full of potholes so vehicles rock and roll, especially the frequent and brutal ‘speed bumps’ designed to slow traffic. These bumps are everywhere on the highway system. In smaller Inka towns, cobblestones still exist.  Tires, brakes, transmissions and shocks are in constant use, and will be the first to give out. Many city streets are packed with lines of stalled vehicles that you could pass walking.  The smart ones are buying motorcycles and scooters to slide by urban traffic on the side, weaving in and out of the stopped. Yet I saw only one electric bicycle, as electric cars, trucks, scooters and bikes have zero infrastructure, parts or repair knowledge so far. Diesel and gas fumes and emissions are the norm.  Only Lima seems to have some standing electric scooters.

The global south has fully adopted the car culture of parts of the north, even though the mostly narrow streets of their cities don’t permit it. Gridlock is sometimes the cost. Many have been turned into one-ways to compensate and that has not improved things, as cars are parked everywhere. In Arequipa and Cusco there are no street car lines, so the public bus systems have to carry the load, or the numerous taxies. Small private micro-bus lines serve rural areas and towns because there is no rail system either, partly due to the mountain ranges. Better-off commuters fly from city to city. At least rural areas have micro-buses, unlike the U.S.   

Like Hanoi or Phnom Penh, it’s a ‘zen process’ to get around.  In Peru it is a social activity where head-light flashes mean one thing, horn beeps another, head nods a third, hand gestures a fourth, vehicle positioning crucial and a precise physical understanding of speed, size and movement essential.  People will back up sometimes to let others through, but if you are there first, you usually rule.  It’s a game of inches.

The heroes in this situation are the drivers navigating big trucks and gigantic tourist buses that must maneuver in tiny streets, dirt roads and monstrous traffic.  Urban garbage truck drivers have a method whereby they enter a block and blare a tune like some ice-cream vendor in the States.  They try to find the one parking area they can fit their truck into along the block.  Then everyone from every business hears the music and comes running down the street with black bags of garbage and roller carts to deposit behind the truck while the sanitation workers sort and load it. A somewhat genius idea, but it shows how there is no room for spatial error.

In Arequipa city I only saw one lone youth on a bicycle and one man riding a tricycle. That was it.  In more rural towns bicycles were more common, along with tuk-tuks built in China that do a good job of replacing fat urban taxis.  They are far smaller, a motorcycle tricycle with covered seating area for two in back.  Some narrow truck beds are also attached to large motorized-tricycles, which are far easier to get through traffic. In a tiny village on the side of a mountain in the Sacred Valley I saw a young mountain biker blaring music shooting down a 45 degree dirt road full of rocks, following a trotting donkey.  I don’t know how he could get back up the mountain on that track. The merging of old and new.

Every Centro district has pedestrian and semi-pedestrian areas, Lima also, which is a relief.  Lima was built later, so it has some wide boulevards and traffic lights, many with protected bike lanes, which also exist on some other streets.  I saw many more e-scooters in the city, along with bicycles.

On the peaks of the Andean range the snow caps and glaciers are shrinking and snow hides in crevices away from the most sunlight.  Tourism and mining have replaced a rural agricultural economy and tourism needs transport.  They are building an airport near the so-called ‘Sacred Valley” on the way to the pagan shrine of Machu Picchu, as even the Sacred Valley has traffic jams.  It is over-tourism with a vengeance, as monied visitors are coming from all over the world. 

The crowded freeways of Houston, LA, Atlanta and Chicago have been replicated in their own way in the urban areas of the ‘global South’ – an inheritance of capitalist development.  The Peruvian rail system is spotty at best, not interconnected and built for freight needs, extending into 3 surrounding countries.  According to Wiki: “Regular passenger traffic now operates over only a small proportion of the mileage.”  The short Perurail© line running from Ollantaytambo to Aquas Calientes / Machu Picchu Puebla is always late, with chaotic platforms full of tourists.  Lima has a one-line Metro system, given its giant and sprawling over-size, so that helps.  Cusco's 'train station' is really a bus station, as they run Perurail buses to 'make connections.'

The upshot is that moving about in Peru is arduous.  Be it the local mini-airport, the pot-holed roads, the buses losing their shocks, the grinding of gears, the tiny roads and streets, the twisting highways, the few trains, the speed bumps – you will be exhausted.  Driving your own car or motorcycle will be an endurance contest. Most of the motorcyclists are fully geared up, to protect from dust and accidents.  This is a legacy of poverty, colonial and imperial extraction and geography at this point. 

P.S. - Later in Lima I saw two small accidents.  

Prior blogspot reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Traffic,”  “Peru,” "tourism."

The Cultural Marxist / May 20, 2025