Driving the Streets of San Miguel

Summer 2009, on the high plateaus of central Mexico. I didn’t come here for the cars. I came seeking sabbatical, including sabbatical from thinking about cars.

Back home, I lead a citizens’ group that has been educating, meeting, talking, battling to shift the balance on the streets of my city in western Canada. It’s about cars — and more. Our rapidly growing group asks the community to rethink its relationship with cars — to broaden its definition of streets — to include the way that people on foot, people sitting on a bench, people on bikes or wheeling a wheelchair create a richer, healthier urban tableau.

City politicians and traffic engineers are starting to say the right things: “transportation alternatives,” “pedestrian-friendly,” “human scale streets.” But it’s exhausting work and, damn it, the sidewalks still end short of their destinations, short of reason, while the bleak black lanes of asphalt dedicated to cars continue to widen and multiply.

My wife and I have landed in Leon, bound for San Miguel de Allende, and to my dismay I’m noticing cars. Our shuttle driver slides us into a big-shouldered black Yukon, starts it up and leaves us with the air conditioning running to help another passenger search for missing luggage. We stretch out, cool off, make basic who/where/what small talk with fellow passengers while I ponder the significance of sitting in a Yukon, idling away on a high dry plateau thousands of kilometers south of the real Yukon territory in northern Canada, where the glaciers recede at record pace.

With the search for luggage abandoned, we are just nicely on our way when the driver veers off the highway. Whoa! Interesting. An intentional ditching. We careen through a rough roadside dip, then up and into a corrugated metal shed. OK, here we have a cultural experience: a drive-through junk food and liquor emporium. Towering shelves on both sides display a fascinating array of jalapeno chips, limon nuts, cookies, Cokes and Fantas, and of course cervezas: Caronas, Sols, Modelos.

We load up and the Yukon bumps back up onto the highway with happy passengers — happy to be driven, to be on the last stretch of a journey. My wife and I sit in the back of three rows, where I can sink into the cavernous leather darkness, and indulge my craving for relative solitude.

As always, the vehicle windows turn the outside world into a TV screen, a passing entertainment. I’m the only one, I’m sure, to notice when we slide by the GM assembly plant at Silao, just south of Leon — 1.2 million square feet, idled by the recession of 2008/09. This Yukon likely came out of that plant — it and its cousins the Suburban, Escalade and Avalanche (another good Canadian image) were assembled here.

The two-lane asphalt to San Miguel and the semi-arid terrain is not dissimilar to two-laners running through Arizona or New Mexico, but when we enter San Miguel de Allende, things change quickly. Courtyard walls close in, narrow walks at their foot, tight cobblestone colonial streets — the Yukon a naval cruiser navigating increasingly narrow creeks, out of a different time and different place.

We disembark into a flood of mechanized sounds, surging up and down the winding city canyons. Grinding gears, rattling loads, a small bore motorcycle’s whine, the rumble and thrum of engines. High electronic beeps signal something, somewhere, backing up.

A small pickup grinds past, bearing the burden of two massive megaphones on its cab and a bed full of campaign signs featuring a handsome candidate. Behind that is a dapper copper-skinned man with silver hair, wearing sharply pressed tan shirt and slacks,  driving a fire-engine-red quad. A little hatchback passes, its (count’em) eight occupants bouncing and swaying on an overloaded suspension, then a white Isuzu pickup with black Policia markings, flashers on the cab and two uniformed officers riding shotgun in the back, holding the flasher bar for balance. Behind them, a woman steers a small scooter, with one sweet faced little girl standing on the its flat little floor between her mom’s knees and an older girl on the seat behind, holding on. Not a helmet to be seen.

To my Canadian eyes and ears it’s auto confusion and conflict — what’s that red off-road quad doing on the road? Don’t the police realize it’s unsafe to ride in open pickups? Where is a functioning headlight on that old beater?

But the aspirations — the relationships between people and their vehicles — are no different than what is seen in the U.S. and Canada. I see those aspirations in the smoked black-out windows of the truck and the shadowy man behind, the old VW bug with the customized yellow wheel wells, the man in the cowboy hat with the truck he has kept running for half his life. The vehicle becomes the identity.

It takes a while, but gradually I learn to read these San Miguel street scenes differently. Over the course of a month, I walk these streets daily, take a number of cab rides across town, and start to see a different street sensibility. It starts when I am told that there are two traffic lights in the whole city (pop. approx 80,000). Furthermore, there are no stop signs.

I stand and watch. What’s happening here? What is the system?

What I learn is that there is no system. That you doesn’t need a system when you, instead, adopt a few principles and follow them. One principle here is that the first car to an intersection has priority. That’s essentially like our four-way stop rules, without all the signage. And there’s a common sense of respect for urgency and priority — someone looking anxious, in a hurry, is likely to get waved into the next available slot in the traffic.

It helps that most of the traffic is slow, by North American standards. This is enforced in a natural way — the cobblestone surfaces and frequent potholes discourage haste.

One day, walking to the writing workshop across town, I look up to see a mom and daughter motoring through the dense traffic on a quad, wearing no helmets, the mom likely giving her girl a lift to school. I think nothing of it. It makes sense, it works, here on the streets of San Miguel de Allende.

Photo Credits

“San Miguel Street Corner” © Lorne Daniel

Recent Lorne Daniel Articles:

• Walking Consultations: moving public engagement beyond opinions
• Murals, pride and history help prevent graffiti
• Striding Unfamiliar Streets
• The Scientific Map Of A Human
• Office Technology As Appliances