Investment Paralyzed By Traffic Congestion

Costa Rica's lack of actions to address the problems of road infrastructure is beginning to take its toll directly, preventing the development of areas with clear productive vocation.

Monday, June 6, 2016

The very success of an area with comparative advantages for operating free zones, call centers and corporate offices, such as those close to Juan Santamaria International Airport, has become a detonator triggering the paralysis suffered by investments in construction of new buildings, simply because of vehicle congestion in Belen, in the Greater Metropolitan area of Costa Rica, is so bad that it is normal to take up to 50 minutes to travel 4 kilometers from the area in question to the access road to the center of the capital.

According to an article on Nacion.com, "... in the canton of Belen, Heredia, located 17 km from La Sabana in San Jose, traffic jams are preventing the creation of 3,000 jobs in the service sector. That's the number of jobs that would be generated by new companies, such as call centers, in a district which already employs 20,000 people, according to Mayor Horacio Alvarado. "

It has been 5 years since a ban was put in place on construction of new projects in the area, issued by the Ministry of Public Works and Transport (MOPT). It has been 5 years since a contract was awarded for a "... diagnosis of the road network, from which solutions were defined"It has been 5 years since anything was done about the problem.  There have been 5 years -at least- of state inefficiency impeding the development of Belen, in the province of Heredia, Costa Rica.

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