A typical morning commute in San Juan, Puerto Rico
When people call-up or send inquires about visiting Puerto Rico, my second question after "When are you looking to visit?" is always, "Are you planning on renting a car?" Visiting Puerto Rico without having a car is a lot like going to Paris with your feet encased in cement; you'll enjoy where you are, but that enjoyment will be pretty limited.
According to worldatlas.com Puerto Rico has the fifth largest number of vehicles per capita in the world at 614 automobiles per 1,000 people. And like much of Latin America, Puerto Rico possesses a plethora of secondhand vehicles originally used on the mainland US in various states of repair (or disrepair considering your perspective), but that is not to say new cars are not popular as well. Near our Skyline View Condo you can practically walk two miles straight from dealer to dealer (both new and used) without missing a space between lots.
Cars are a part of the culture and infrastructure here; and topography certainly plays a role as well. With a relatively narrow coastal plane rapidly giving way to foothills and then mountains, any form of public transportation is, by necessity, slow and circumlocutory. A century ago, when a train ringed the island, it could take eight hours (or more) to get from San Juan to Mayagüez, a trip that usually takes about 2.5 hours by car today. And it probably wouldn't be that much less now, when one considers that trains have grade issues and the necessity of having to make periodic stops for people to get on and off of them.
Likewise is the problem of the central mountains. Autopista 52 is a masterpiece of civil engineering, and the drive from San Juan to Ponce is the climatic equivalent of going from Honolulu to Los Angeles by way of Seattle and Arizona, all within ninety minutes. The grade is steep and dramatic, but to take a train up through those mountains and the verdant rain forest would be an engineering and maintenance nightmare. Even with tractor trailers, gravel escapements appear every few kilometers to allow truckers (who may have lost their brakes somewhere up and over) the opportunity to stop without loosing control of their rig. One cannot imagine how a train would react to that kind of scenario.
For the casual visitor however, car travel need not be too scary. Paragraphs and folios have been written about Puertorican drivers and even within this house there are divided opinions. For me, driving in Puerto Rico is a great, elaborate pageant with live animals (horses, cattle, chickens, iguanas) lively open air bazaars (usually on the median, even on highways-- or the shoulder. Grand ballet (if a traffic light fails there is no gratuitous honking, every single person entering the intersection yields in turn-- problem solved). And absolute pragmatism (traffic backed up? No vendors on the shoulder? Cool! Let's get moving! New lane!!!).
For Travis it's a very different experience: for him driving here is more like a purgatorial slalom course. Live animals? Yes. Horses in the road blocking the right of way (they actually HAVE the right of way) or nuzzling each other in the back of a pick-up truck as it twists and turns up a mountain side at fifteen miles per hour. Chickens (mother, chicks and all) snarling traffic as they cross the road (to get to the other side of course). Iguanas darting out in a death sprint. Open air bazaars? People cutting across three lanes of traffic to buy a mango. Grand ballet? Twenty-five cars backing up because someone has decided to let someone else make a U turn through six lanes of traffic-- three on one side of the median-- three on the other. Pragmatism? See an old friend? Why not stop in the middle of the road and catch up. who knows when you'll run into them again?
You get the idea.
Still, driving in Puerto Rico will allow you the freedom of going where you want, when you want, and to see the beauty of our charming island, and even the most mundane drive (once you leave San Juan) will offer incredible vistas: stunning beaches; plunging waterfalls; sweeping valleys.
Hopefully a cow wont block the view though.
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