San Miguel's Parking Problem

San Miguel has traffic problems. I heard that during the holidays the traffic was bumper-to-bumper gridlock throughout the centro. Although the gringos were affected too, the majority of the traffic is Mexican cars and trucks. And of course with all the cars parking is a problem in the narrow streets especially since they are starting to limit more and more where you can park on the street in the centro. We have noticed that more cars are getting parked in our Colonia because it is an easy walk into town.

The City Fathers and the State of Guanajuato decided that this situation needed to be addressed so they took the soccer fields and built a huge parking lot. It is in a pretty good place so that you could walk into town or if you walk about two blocks you are at Ancha de San Antonio which is a major bus route and you can hop a bus to where you want to go in the centro. They also made space for buses to load and unload right by the parking lot and we have been told that the city has requested bids for a bus route that will circulate from the parking lot to the centro. Doesn't all of this sound good?

The picture above is approximately 1/2 of San Miguel's new parking lot. The rest of it is to the left of the yellow building on the top left. If you look really hard at the center of the picture you will see five, maybe six cars parked in the parking lot. Now San Miguel has two parking problems. First, narrow streets that are congested with parked cars and moving cars and secondly a nice parking lot that no one is parking in.

I'm not a city planner but my guess as to why people aren't parking there would be that the parking costs 9 pesos an hour and that unless you are a resident you probably don't know that the parking lot exists on this side street since there is only one sign that I know of that points to the lot. Nine pesos an hour is a lot for the Mexicans but the gringos gripe about it too. There are no discounts or weekly rates to encourage people who drive in and work in the downtown to park here. No lower prices at night. Marketing wasn't my major but it just seems like to me that if they lowered the cost and had more than five or six cars parked there they would make as much money AND they would reduce the congestion in the centro.