New neighborhoods, new roads, and no signs to govern them

Road safety in Tulum rests on streets that were opened without signage or municipal ownership, and the local association of engineers and architects says the south of town is where the risk is concentrated.

Francisco Javier Galindo Rojas, president of the Colegio de Ingenieros y Arquitectos de Tulum, said the gaps in road infrastructure, signage and urban order are mainly in the sectors growing fastest, and that they have to be addressed to reduce the risk of crashes as residential areas and new roads keep multiplying.

The municipality's own count gives that warning a size. Tulum's traffic and roads department registered 316 traffic incidents between January 1 and April 12 of this year, two of them fatal, and its director, Rosario Jessica Osorio Zavala, put the share involving motorcycles at around 70 percent when she released the figures in April.

Motorcycles are the working transport of the colonias he is describing, the cheapest way to get across town where getting around without a car still comes down to a moto or a bicycle.

Road safety in Tulum starts with who owns the street

One of the questions that will have to be examined, Galindo Rojas said, is the municipalization of some roads and developments. That process would allow the municipality to supply infrastructure and set the conditions it requires for signage, circulation, and safety.

Municipalization is the formal handover. A developer builds the streets and the public spaces inside a subdivision, and until the municipality receives them and takes them onto its books, they remain the builder's responsibility, outside the reach of a public works budget. Tulum's south is filled with projects through the building cycle that is only now cooling. The paperwork behind the pavement did not keep pace.

"That implies infrastructure, which we have to look at in terms of roads, signage and signs. We have many plans and, together with the municipality, that part of the collaboration with Planning, Urban Development, Infrastructure and Public Works," Galindo Rojas said.

The idea has been in circulation for years. In 2023, Lorenzo Bernabé Miranda Miranda, then the municipality's director general of sustainable urban territorial development, said Tulum had asked the federal transport ministry to extend municipalization along the federal highway as far as the Aldea Tulum subdivision, at kilometer 221 of the road toward Felipe Carrillo Puerto, with a northern stretch to kilometer 231 also under consideration.

The Colegio maintains a standing channel with Urban Development, Planning, Public Works, and Civil Protection, Galindo Rojas said, to provide technical criteria on regulation and infrastructure, and the aim is to combine municipal and federal funds to advance signage and road adjustments in stages.

316 crashes by April 12, and most involved motorcycles

Osorio Zavala put the preliminary causes in order when she released the April count: drivers failing to comply with restrictive signage, insufficient distance between vehicles, and speed. Both deaths in that period were men, and she said alcohol had not been confirmed as a determining factor in either, unlike other years.

Taxis barely register. The department logged three or four incidents involving public service units over the same three and a half months, against the motorcycle share she estimated at roughly seven in ten.

Set beside the Colegio's warning, the two accounts point at different streets. A driver can only disobey a restrictive sign where one has been installed.

What the engineers describe are the blocks where it never was.

"Respecting speed and signs can make the difference," Osorio Zavala said in April, framing the problem as one of driver behavior.

The test runs on Calle 7

One street is already carrying the experiment. A pilot program with various roadway interventions is underway on Calle 7 in the La Veleta neighborhood, Galindo Rojas said, and its results will determine whether the design is worth repeating. Similar projects are contemplated for other locations in the municipality and will be replicated as resources become available.

He did not describe the interventions, give a start date, or say when the evaluation ends.

La Veleta is a logical place to start and a hard one. It is the same neighborhood where Tulum Sostenible asked the municipality in September to test the aquifer underneath, after residents sent the group videos of cloudy, foul-smelling water. The colonia spread south and west of the town center faster than the services behind it.

Sedetus puts a bypass four to five years out

The state is answering Tulum's traffic at a different scale and on a different clock. On August 27, the Secretaría de Desarrollo Territorial Urbano Sustentable, headed by José Alberto Alonso Ovando, said it is planning a bypass around the town and a pair of one-way routes in the coastal strip.

The bypass is the more advanced of the two. It has an executive project, and the state is working on releasing the right-of-way along a route designed to avoid cenotes, rejolladas, and fractures in the limestone. Environmental studies follow. On the state's own estimate, the road would be ready in four to five years. The coastal pair still has no executive project.

Signage and a transfer of title sit at the other end of that scale, in both cost and calendar. That is the stretch the Colegio is asking the municipality to cover while the large projects move through the permitting process.

What happens on Calle 7 is the first piece anyone can measure. Galindo Rojas said the schemes would be replicated as municipal and federal resources allow, and he did not name which roads or developments would enter the municipalization process first. Until that list exists, the streets in the south stay as they were built.

Which street in your part of Tulum needs signage and speed control first? Join the conversation and share your perspective with us on Instagram and Facebook at @thetulumtimes.