The colectivos of Mexico

Around parts of Mexico, the main mode of transport appears to be the colectivo: half-bus half-car. A typical colectivo journey works something like this:

The colectivo driver approaches you offering a ride.  He is not a taxi-driver - he won’t take you anywhere.  He has a specified destination. Also, you’ll be lucky to get the car to yourself – he waits till the taxi is full.  And when I say full, I mean 3 at the back and 2 passengers at the front, plus driver. How’s that for car-sharing?

Random strangers squeeze together, the passenger in the front in the middle obliged to bend their knees awkwardly so as not to get in the way of the gearstick, but nobody complains.

On this particular journey, one of the passengers in the front got out a short way along the way to be replaced by a mother and small (but not that small) child. So, now there was the driver and six passengers racing round the windy mountain roads of southern Oaxaca.  I found it particularly amusing that the soldiers at the checkpoint we passed didn’t bat an eyelid.

Colectivos are the king of the road.  In Oaxaca city, about two thirds of the vehicles on the main ring road seemed to be colectivos, with much of the rest of the traffic made up of normal buses. If people have private cars, they don’t seem to use them in town.

They also appear to serve a social role similar to the hairdressers, with passengers and drivers gossiping with one another about the football or the latest strike or blockade (there are quite a lot of blockades in Oaxaca).

On our journey to the seaside town of La Crucecita, the strength of the social bonds represented by the colectivos was revealed in another way. Before we set off, another colectivo driver pulled up next to us to tell the driver that there’d been an accident on the main road ahead.  With this insider knowledge, our driver was able to nip onto a little dust-track and, stopping every now and then to get directions from colectivo drivers heading in the opposite direction, and of course from the passengers, we were able to find our way back onto the main road beyond the sight of the accident. Then, rather than speeding away, our driver rolled past the cars waiting in the traffic stuck on the road to explain the situation and advise them of the dirt road.

He then preceded to terrify us as he sped along the winding dark road to La Crucecita, aggressively overtaking everything in his path, and no doubt reducing his fuel efficiency somewhat.  Nothing’s perfect!