September 3, 2007

Santo Domingo Journal

A Subway: Just What’s Needed. Or Is It?

By MARC LACEY

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic, Sept. 1 — Dominicans are singing about their subway. They are arguing about it. No trains are in place yet, not to mention rails or turnstiles, and the Santo Domingo Metro has become as hot a topic of conversation as the fate of Dominicans’ favorite baseball team, the New York Yankees.

As of now, the subway is a hole in the ground, a mountain of concrete, a stretch of tunnels where workers are racing to meet President Leonel Fernández’s construction deadline of early next year, in time for the presidential election in May in which he hopes to win a new term. Meanwhile, the debate about the merits of the project — from song lyrics to heated conversations over bottles of Presidente beer — is as intense as the flurry of subterranean shoveling and welding and hammering.

Only the second underground rail system in the Caribbean — the first is in San Juan, Puerto Rico — Santo Domingo’s subway project is, to some, a colossal exercise in bad judgment, a white elephant on rails. To others, though, it is a forward-thinking solution to the capital’s serious traffic congestion.