As they say,  “no pain, no gain” be prepared for a little pain on Monday March 20 as drivers get accustomed to new traffic patterns in downtown San Jose.

MOPT announced yesterday that a plan to reorganize the roads on the western side of the capital, to decongest the street that runs behind Paseo Colon. Buses should take less time on their routes if the measures work as expected.

A big change is the new exclusive lanes for buses on Avenue 10, the street that passes by San José city hall.  From , that of the 1:10 a.m. to mid day the lane will go towards San José, and from 12:10 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. it will reverse direction towards La Sabana.  The three remaining lanes will be for other vehicles, and will continue to operate in a West to East fashion.

Another big change is that avenue 1, from the Juan Rafael Mora school to the north side of Purdy Motor, will reverse direction.  Now it will be from east to west, as a priority route for buses.

The Transit Police will be helping drivers on March 20th, and controlling the restricted yellow parking areas and to prevent private vehicles from using the new exclusive bus lanes. Naughty drivers will recieve citations for a 5 thousand colon fine.

The routes of buses that will change are those of the hospital Mexico, The Amusement Park, El Carpio and Pavas.  Ciudad Colon, Puriscal, Palmichal, Piedras Blancas, Escazú, and Santa Ana.

The buses of the Perifrica, Savannah-Cemetery, Savannah-Stadium and Pitahaya slo usarn the walk Coln of west to this, therefore not habr stops in the north side of the Walk Coln.

The National Truckers Chamber has maps with the new stops and routes, call  283-1820.

After the official scrutiny of the Heredia province, the preliminary results held up and as expected PLN and PAC gained the 5 seats in the next Assembly. After the manual count, the PLN had 60,910 votes, so they received 3 seats, the legislators will be Fernando Sánchez, Hilda González y José Ángel Ocampo.

PAC received 51,324 votes, which is worth 2 seats for Francisco Molina and Lesbia Villalobos.

The Libertarian party was 1,671 votes short of getting a seat.

Here are the totals to date.