Caracas is a city meant to be driven. For decades, gas has cost ten cents a gallon, turning Venezuela’s capital into a place where oil is cheaper than purified water, and, amidst 33% inflation, the price of filling up is the only thing that has not and will not ever change. What has this done to my fellow citizens of Venezuela?

The car has become a form of social survival. The car is our access key. Our mobility, even our freedom, is contingent on having a vehicle. It is so essential to living in this city that it has become an extension of our physical selves. We’d sooner walk out without shoes on than leave without our cars.

No one walks, and even those who can’t drive themselves call a friend, or a cab, or a mototaxi. Sidewalks are obsolete – nothing more than uneven pieces of crumbling cement. To walk in Caracas is not to stroll or jaunt but to jump from island to island of sidewalk amidst roots and dog shit, and is usually only done to go to and from our parked car.
Caracas is meant to be driven, but it is not designed for driving. There are no six-lane highways, no jumbling and intertwining of exits and destinations. Caracas once had dreamers who envisioned for this city a subway, a highway, and a way for all to arrive their way somewhere. Traces of these structures remain, but the city has grown like mold while its infrastructures remained stagnant. This translates into traffic. Terrible, abominable, traffic.

Hands down, traffic is the most exasperating human experience of the modern era. There is a particular pain to waiting in line that differentiates it from the other hassles of urban life, and waiting in line is all that traffic is; a city-wide queue to get from point A to point B. Waiting in line is watching life pass you by; literally, picturing all the other things you could be doing and having to accept that there is nothing you can do to speed up this infinite process of waiting. You must stand there and waste away, fully aware that you are wasting away.

And can you imagine four million people trying to arrive on time to their lives while sharing a handful of outdated roads? Traffic in LA may be bad. Traffic in New York can be unbearable. But I stand firm: you have never known a traffic jam until you’ve been in Caracas. Getting from Altamira to Prados del Este at 5pm on a Friday is a menial task that could have taken twenty minutes at 3 pm that same day, but now, with the rain pouring down, it will take three hours.

Because we must spend all this time on the move without ever moving, our cars become our primary habitat. While riding to school in the morning, my sister and I would nap, finish dressing, and even complete neglected homework. For my father, the car is a classroom where he listens to radio in French and English. His cocoon becomes ours; it is an owned space, a piece of nomadic real estate, the only place in the world where we can feel unrestrained thanks, of course, to the tinted windows.
It’s odd the number of things I’ve seen people do in their cars when they assume that no one is watching. Applying makeup is a given; the national joke is that mascara never looks the same as when applied during rush hour. I’ve seen people changing clothes, painting their nails, singing at full volume, reading, eating, texting; my belly dance teacher once taught us to practice hip movements as we drove.

Our cars envelop us. They wrap us up in leather and steel. Their tinted windows prevent others from seeing in just as much as they make us forget to look out. Cars become capsules of safety, of ignorance, where even the air is conditioned. On my way to school every morning we’d pass under the highway where a woman and her two children lived. She would sell newspapers and beg, asking for change from passing cars with a discarded milk carton. One of her children she wore strapped to her back. The other she held by the hand. The eldest child was a girl my age: thin, wiry, with the tell-tale bulging tummy of someone feeding parasites within her more than she feeds herself.

My mother, who doesn’t read the news, would buy newspapers from this woman. Occasionally, she would fill the milk carton with spare change. But one day it came to my attention that I simply couldn’t come up with one good reason why this girl and I found ourselves on opposite sides of my car door. It dawned on me that my car was as much a metal wall as it was my cocoon.
I further realized that, as exposed as she was, and as blatant as the poverty is where I come from, the car always acts as supreme insulator. In a city where there is a beggar at every light and a family under every bridge, the degree to which a vehicle acts as a metal encasing of luxury and comfort is incredible. Inside it, we can exist without ever once having to really acknowledge what lies on the other side of our windows.

Because our windows are tinted, we assume that we do not have to see, just as we think others cannot see us. Because the air we breathe is purified and the temperature of our atmosphere controlled, we forget that there are people inches from us breathing in the smog that our very capsules emit. If our music weren’t so loud, then perhaps we’d have to hear the cries outside, but we blast it and continue unhearing, unseeing. And what is more terrifying than unseeing is the notion that perhaps we don’t forget to look outside; perhaps we willfully amputate our senses to only smell and see and hear what is comfortable. Perhaps we convince ourselves that we must drive, that there is no alternative to existing in this capsule, that Caracas is a city meant to be driven.