Panama’s Newest Traffic Light
Panama is a fairly small country with a cosmopolitan capital city. Within Panama City you can find just about anything you may need. Once you leave Panama City, that’s not always the case. Panama’s interior towns are so small that up until last week, you couldn’t even find a traffic light outside of the capital.
The capital of Herrera province, Chitre, is Panama’s only interior town to have a traffic light. The light is located at the intersection near the McDonald’s and the Banco Nacional. Drivers were immediately confused by this new light in their hometown. There used to be traffic lights throughout the country, but most of them fell in to disrepair and were removed.
The morning the light was installed, the north-south bound traffic was given flashing yellow lights, while the east-west traffic was given flashing reds. Four-way stops are not common in Panama, nor are temporary lights that need to be treated as such. Drivers were stopping at the flashing red lights for half an hour waiting for the light to turn green.
Once the lights were fully functional later in the afternoon, traffic was backed up for quite some time. Most likely the intention of the traffic light was to ease traffic congestion in that area, but it did the opposite. Panama City has a new traffic jam rival, Chitre.
Hopefully once area drivers get used to the new traffic signals, congestion will ease and motorists will see the benefit of these lights. Until then, motorists will most likely be cursing the only traffic signal outside of Panama City.
If you can think of a traffic light that is currently in use outside of Panama City, let us know!
| Written by Rebecca Tyre |  |
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Filed under: Country Guide, News on November 10th, 2008
the intersection at the main drag through chitre and the via circunvulacion is one of the most dangerous in the herrera province. i’ve cheated death many times at this spot while driving to the nearby bus terminal and the hotel guayacanes. this intersection is also a few blocks from the hospital in chitre.
in order to cross this street during the day you basically have to enter the intersection and force the cross-traffic to slow down or stop. sometimes that happens and sometimes cars swerve around you, laying on their horn for a good five seconds. i can only wonder as to how many thousands of fender benders and t-bone smashes have occurred there over the decades.
panama should be given credit for attempting to bring some amount of order the current transportation system. somebody somewhere is listening to the needs of the people.
hey,
david has had 1 stop light for over a year now and we got our second one within the last year.
herrera has nothing on chiriqui…jajaja
And so it begins…..the do gooders have arrived and are determined to make Panama into what they left behind. Not considering for 1 minute that maybe thats the way people want it or like it. Pretty soon it’ll be Street lights, sidewalks and gutters all over Panama.
How about this….if you want all that stuff just go back to where you came from and leave us alone and happy. We’ll deal with the problems as responsible citizens and not have newly arrived outsiders changing everything to suit their needs.
Sorry but I’ve seen this happen before.