They want to teach us not to respect the rules

It is already known that in new urban societies, product of strong rural migration, training citizens to comply with the rules is essential. Municipal governments must fulfill an important pedagogical role, as some mayors of Bogotá have shown, who have produced enormous advances in citizen education so that the city is the space that truly generates a better quality of life.

Unfortunately, the opposite happens in our environment: what the authorities teach us is more like not respecting the rules, or better, as it should be, not respecting the rules. We will give some examples.

First example: Left turns are prohibited in many roundabouts, but enforcement is not controlled, so little by little, the most “alive” drivers begin to ignore it and turn left, without anything happening. The honest citizen who observes the impunity of the maneuver feels like a fool, but his citizen training does not allow him to do the same, even so, he is left with tremendous frustration.

Second example: The traffic lights remain on 24 hours a day, changing from red to green, when at dawn there is no traffic to justify them. It happens that the law abiders stay waiting for their green light, although there are no vehicles on the other side, but the “machos” just pass. The problem is, from what time should you no longer obey the traffic lights, 10 at night? one in the morning? It is not known, but again, law abiders look like idiots. In other cities, after a certain hour, the lights turn all yellow, to indicate caution, but without giving priority… or the lights go out.

Third example: From time to time, municipal governments “think” that they want to be ecological, and instruct citizens to select the garbage. In some cases they even gave us bags of various colors. Many of us were excited and began to sort the solid waste, unaware that the selected bags were picked up by officials and immediately thrown into the truck in front of our eyes. Phosphorus work.

Fourth example: Exclusive lanes for buses, the most massively violated rule of all, but there it is, painted on the floor… If it doesn’t work, eliminate it, but don’t maintain a fiction, it’s anti-pedagogical.

But curiously, there are some rules that do like to demand that they be met, even though these rules are more than 20 years old and no one knows what their purpose is. This is what happens with the prohibition of parking up to one block from the square, a rule born when it was thought that what should be sought was “the flow” of traffic and not parking, which today is the real priority.

The traffic police, municipal officials and tow truck owners love that old Ordinance, which, as we said, no one knows what it is for anymore, but they enthusiastically demand its compliance and there they are, in the post of duty, even though there is a double-row “tanga” that harms traffic a thousand times more, but which they don’t even look at.

To conclude, we propose that instead of saying “made the law, made the cheat”, which blames the neighbor, say “made the law, I keep it if it suits me, if not, I forget about it”.