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Sidelong Cyclingby John Whiteley, President 1995-1996November 1999Living and working in Puerto Rico can be fun. Honestly. The fun part comes in the sense of humor that you must cultivate to keep from tearing your hair out as you deal with the "Ay, Bendito!" mentality. What’s ay, bendito? It’s hard to define, but a few examples will suffice. Say, for instance, you come home from work to find that your telephone service has been cut off. You know that you’ve paid the bill, and you never received any notices, but there’s still no comforting buzz when you pick up the phone. So you go to your neighbor’s house (your phone doesn’t work, remember?) and call the telephone company. Now, remember, the telephone company is owned and operated by the government, and it has not one but two public service (sic) employee unions representing the workers (sic again). An interminable search reveals that your account is current and there’s no reason that your phone shouldn’t be working. The fact remains, however, that there’s no way to communicate with the outside world with the inanimate lump of plastic in your house. Ay, bendito, someone (surely not the paragon of unionized efficiency with whom you’re speaking!) must have made a mistake and, in a week or two, everything should be straightened out. Again, said with a sigh, Ay, bendito. It wasn’t always like this. A few years ago, it was worse. Imagine, if you will, an island of 3 million people, most of whom own automobiles. The government has arranged it so that all the registrations of all the automobiles on the island, every single one of them, expire on June 30. And there’s no renewal by mail. You must appear in person. And stand in line. A long line. Sometimes more than one, especially if your renewal indicates that you have unpaid parking tickets. There’s no resort to a court hearing or any other sort of adjudication - the form says you haven’t paid this parking ticket, so you have to go and stand in another line, someplace else, pay the outstanding fine, then come back to this line to renew your tags. And, this being Puerto Rico, everyone has waited until the last day of the month to jump through the governmental hoops. Apocalypse Now comes to San Juan. Oh, the humanity! Luckily, when Yr. Obd’t Svt. lived in Puerto Rico he was in the service so the car was registered in Tennessee. The only annual requirement was to purchase the Commonwealth insurance (the stuff that didn’t really insure anything - you still had to pay if you were found liable, and if you were the wronged party you waited until the guilty party, not the Commonwealth insurance agency, coughed up the damages. And if you were a gringo you were rich, by definition, and therefore had no right to expect payment, such as from the poor fool who had been driving his horse cart the wrong way down an eight-lane expressway, at night, with no lights. No fooling - this actually happened. The court found the American, who was driving under the speed limit, in the right lane, in the proper direction, with his lights on, guilty. He had more money than the farmer. It’s only simple justice, right?) Anyway, if you have lived here long enough to remember, Tennessee tags used to be pretty plain, with no pictures of the Capitol building, and they had one or two numbers, a letter, and three numbers. By sheer coincidence, Puerto Rico also had two numbers, a letter, and three numbers. Even today I feel sorry for the poor driver who was unlucky enough to have PR tag 51F493. He may have lived in Cabo Rojo, but when registration time came around he found that he had a number of outstanding parking tickets in San Juan. Ay, bendito. These thoughts came to mind upon reading the San Juan Star two weeks ago. On page three there was a story of an excavation on Avenida De Diego, just south of the Condado tourist area. Those of you who were on the tour of Puerto Rico last February know the area well - it’s about two blocks south of the El Canario Hotel. Seems like the Public Works people (more unionized government workers) dug a hole in the road. A deep hole. Deep enough to swallow a new Volkswagen (or an old one, for that matter) or to swallow a number of bicycles. Then, when the hole was finished, they left it. No attempt to fill in the hole, just this deep excavation in the street with a pile of dirt next to it. Actually, this isn’t something that would deserve page three in most newspapers except for the appearance of that pile of dirt. You see, it had been there so long that there was grass on it. Not just a few tufts here and there. It actually looked better than my lawn did at the end of August. You could have played golf on grass that thick and green. And still no sign of anyone from Public Works appearing with shovel in hand to do the right thing. But, in that same issue of the San Juan Star there was an article that made me sit up and take notice. Then, after reading the article, it made my heart sing. One of the regular columnists Peggy Ann Bliss, wrote and article about "Making San Juan Bike Friendly." What an idea! To propose that, in a city that’s spending gazillions of tax dollars to build a light rail system (El Tren Urban) to ease traffic congestion, the encouragement of cycling might add to the quality of life is like a breath of fresh air (literally!) Seems that Mrs. Bliss grew up and went to college in a town that didn’t allow motorized vehicles on the college campus, so she had learned of the joys of cycling first hand. It didn’t hurt that her niece is a world-champion mountain biker, either. It was just great to see cycling promoted in such a public forum. Now if we can only get the Ports Authority to allow bicycles on the Cantano Ferry again... The lesson of today’s sermon? Support Bike Chattanooga! You never know how good you have it until you see how much worse off other parts of the world really are. HFDF (Have fun, don’t fall) John
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