The Dominican Republic's Public Transportation System

2211 Words5 Pages

Daniel Monzón
SEE: B
November 2014
Draft #2

According to Global Foundation three out of four (75%) of the Dominican Republic Population uses the Public Transportation system. Out of those 75% 40.9% are poor and depend on the Public Transportation system to move around the city to get to their jobs or to take their children to school. The problem with this is that our Public Transportation system can’t be trusted or relied on because several reasons. Every day thousands of citizens are endangered by the system. It could be a mom taking a Carro Publico to take her kids to school or it could be a businessman going to work in his own car.

High school student Adonis Tineo lay motionless in an overflowing emergency room on a recent afternoon after …show more content…

“The Dominican Republic is effectively the deadliest nation anywhere for drivers. For every 100,000 inhabitants in the Dominican Republic, 42 die every year from traffic accidents, according to the World Health Organization.”(Lopez) The departments in the Dominican Republic who are supposed to control and regulate the vehicles and ensure safety on the streets are clearly not doing their job. There are several departments in charge of this but the main department that is supposed to do this is the Ministerio de Obras Publicas y Comunicaciones (MOPC) that is a government organization. Which makes me think that everything run by the government in this country seems to not work properly. After reading the (MOPC) plan of constructions for this year I found out that they are planning on spending more than 11 billion pesos on the construction of a Naval Base and a sports facility in the city. Making this organization completely useless when it comes to improving the road safety. Also the law enforcement in the Dominican Republic is practically useless when it come to the safety of the public. “Speed limits vary from 25 mph in the city to 60 mph on rural roads, but they are generally not enforced”. (U.S Department of State) Drivers doing what they want on the streets because of no law enforcement and the terrible condition of the roads and vehicles are the perfect recipes for …show more content…

This has lead over the years for visitors and many of the uppercase citizens to get private drivers know as chofer in D.R. “Visitors to the Dominican Republic might want to consider hiring a professional driver during their stay in lieu of driving themselves”. (U.S Department of State) Visitors and citizens have no other option that hiring a driver, this people don’t want to go through the hassle of driving in our chaotic streets so they have no other option. Public transportation in the D.R is so disorganized and unreliable that the cost and benefit ratio of hiring a driver is a lot better than using the Public Transport offered. “In Santo Domingo, there was an excess of 3 million motorized trips made every day in 2004. 280,000 of these motorized trips occurred during the peak hour – and over 70%” (196,000) of these were on some form of public transit (OPRET, 2004). As shown here another big cause of the disorganization of the system is the amount of vehicle that transit through the streets. “The existing “public” transport system in Santo Domingo is comprised of an assortment of modes, only a few of which are actually publically owned. Before the Metro was built, the national bus service, OMSA, was the only true public intra-urban system in Santo Domingo.”(FUNGLODE) This is why traffic in the city is terrible. For example when I am of to school

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