Residents and entrepreneurs from Costa Rica’s northern zone on Wednesday met with President Luis Guillermo Solís and asked him to move faster with the project to build a new road to San Carlos, a project they have been waiting for more than 40 years.
Advertising spaces along streets and at bus shelters around Costa Rica's capital have gone blank and will be removed. Some are illegal; others must be scrapped, city authorities say, because the contract governing them doesn't say who owns them now that the contract is up.
Shocking, we know, but a total of 95 percent of paved roads in Costa Rica are not of adequate quality or do not have the appropriate capacity to handle the current amount of traffic on any given day, a study by the University of Costa Rica's National Laboratory of Materials and Structural Models found.
Prior to the project’s approval by the Legislative Assembly in February various professional and business groups warned that changes to the project would be needed and that those changes would inflate the price tag.
Some have voiced concerns about the project’s final price tag, specifically the cost of expropriating land for the expansion. The bill must now be signed by President Luis Guillermo Solís before becoming law.
The project will expand the traffic-choked section of the Inter-American highway between San José and Juan Santamaría International Airport to eight lanes, and to four lanes from the airport to San Ramón. Monday's signing ceremony was also a victory for civic groups who had battled to revoke the original concession that they said was too expensive and the result of backroom deals.
“These numbers show a stable, solid financial system with liquidity that is contributing to the growth of the local economy by providing financial resources to virtually all sectors, both commercial and personal.”
