Reducing Traffic Stress in Lima

Living in Lima, Peru comes with all the joys of a city of nearly 9 million people with a transport system deisgned for a tiny fraction of this number.  With the Peruvian economy booming more and more people are purchasing, many for the first time, cars.  Behind the wheel of their new cars these people take their vehicles onto the already congested city streets.  The good news is that they streets are so congested that it is hard to see what a few more cars will do to make things any worse.  Within a year or so the transport situation in Lima will reach a point of no return.  

Added to this problem are the thousands of "buses" (I use this term lightly as many of them decades ago lost any quality that would have made them a bus) cruise the streets looking for passengers.  As their is very light, read not at all, enforcement these transport units (better term) are allowed to do whatever they want including stopping and picking up passengers wherever they wish.  If you really want to have some fun ask a Lima transport unit driver how many bus stops are on his route and I gurantee that he will be unable to answer the question.  

Thankfully, there appears to be some one at least trying to make this situation a bit better for everybody and it comes from a most unlikely source, the Dept. of Labor (Min. del Trabajo) http://www.elcomercio.com.pe/ediciononline/HTML/2008-12-10/regularan-jornadas-laborales-choferes-transporte-publico.html.  They announced that the will be cracking down on the companies that make their drivers work 12+ hour days without a break.  This is with the goal of reducing the hours of the drivers and thus their stress and levels of drowsiness, which will hopefully correleate to less accidents and a happy driving experience for everybody.  

I do not hold out a lot of hope but something needs to be done to try to confront this transport beast that has become unbearable here in Lima so here's to the Dept. of Labor!