A 10 Step Plan To Repave Old San Juan

We need to repave Old San Juan. It’s overdue and the city is falling apart. We also need to convert it into a pedestrian city. Here’s a 10 step plan to do just that.

My name is Orlando Mergal. I’m just a guy with a camera, a computer and the Internet. I’ve been visiting Old San Juan since the early 70’s… and I’d like to see it repaved. Not in cheap concrete bricks but in its original blue slag pavers. Old San Juan is the oldest city in Puerto Rico and the second oldest in the Western Hemisphere. It’s also the oldest continuously operating city in the United States and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Oh, and did I mention that it’s beautiful?

Visiting Old San Juan is like stepping back in history. The architecture, the streets and the old forts, the churches all transport you to the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. It’s like Disneyland but without the animatronics. It’s also full of restaurants, bars and small hotels. It’s a cosmopolitan city like no other in America.

But vehicular traffic is killing Old San Juan. Somehow, in some twisted way, Puerto Ricans picked up the notion that its fun to sit in a car —sometimes for hours at a time— drive over potholes in the blistering tropical sun, and pollute everything around them. It’s sheer idiocy if you ask me, but it happens day in and day out.

Just think of it. Finding a parking spot in Old San Juan is murder, you can’t bring your car with you into restaurants and museums, so why drive at all? Why not walk?

Residents have it a little easier. They can park on the streets. However, being able to do something and actually getting to do it are two different things. Most of the time they end up parking far from home and exposing their vehicles to potential hazards. Many of them end up paying for parking at one of several garages.

There are better ways to deal with these problems and most of them aren’t new. This kind of problem has plagued small cities in Europe for decades. And what they’ve found is that solving it is a matter of leaving childish attitudes behind and creating the infrastructure to make things happen.

The ideas that I’m about to propose in this article aren’t new. Hell, most of them aren’t even mine. I’ve seen them all before in Europe and in the United States. You probably have too. And believe me, THEY WORK!!! Some people might consider them hair brain. But hey, I’m not an urban planner. I’m just a concerned citizen. We’re destroying Old San Juan!!! So if you don’t like my ideas, “NO PROBLEMO”. Feel free to bring up your own. Let’s discuss them, and if they’re better we’ll use them. Let’s actually resolve a problem.

1. “Departamento De Hacienda”, a building in the wrong place

Puerto Rico’s Treasury Department is located across the street from Pier 4 in Old San Juan. Why? In my view a Treasury Department is nothing but a giant accounting office, so it could work just as well in Hato Rey (where there are plenty of underutilized buildings), at Metro Office Park or anywhere else —for that matter— where there’s adequate space, power and data facilities. The only reason why “Hacienda” is in Old San Juan is because that’s where it was when most of Puerto Rico’s commercial shipping and wholesaling operations took place in Old San Juan. That was back in the 50’s and 60’s. This is 2020.

So step one would be moving the Treasury Department somewhere else, demolishing the building and erecting a parking structure large enough to accommodate all the cars belonging to Old San Juan residents and tourists. The building would need to be attractive enough to sit in front of the tourism peers, although lately government has been doing everything in its power to scare off every imaginable cruise ship company (but that’s a story for another day).

2. Micro Buses, the only viable way to get around Old San Juan

Some time ago an idiot tried to drive a full-sized school bus down “Calle Del Sol” and “Caleta De Las Monjas”. Needless to say, he made a fool of himself, messed up the bus and destroyed a great amount of government property. And who’ll pick up the tab? Probably you and I.

Simply put, Old San Juan wasn’t built for large vehicles. In fact, it wasn’t built for gas vehicles at all. Back in the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries people got around on foot, on horseback or on horse drawn carriages. That’s why the streets in Old San Juan are so narrow and the houses have no garages.

Small Europeans cities had similar dilemmas but they found a solution. They call them “micro buses”, or at least that’s what they call them in Spain, where I saw them first.

Once again, they’re nothing new. I rode the first one back in 1984. They’re simply small vans like the ones used by car rental companies to drive tourists from and to the airport. They shuttle residents from a central parking area to their destination and back. Riding these shuttle buses is generally free since anyone using them will be either a resident, a tourist or a visitor conducting some kind of business in the city.

Another option would be to make them free for residents carrying some sort of magnetic card and charge a small fee to tourists and visitors. However, that would make the system less attractive for the later group.

Last year I saw a shuttle system like this in Oklahoma City. The shuttles are a little larger, and they charge you a dollar for the ride, but they are sleek, modern, and clean. Oh, and did I mention that they run on renewable energy? That’s right. No gas!

3. Slag Pavers, the orinal idea

The original blue pavers found in Old San Juan today were imported from England starting in the late 19th Century. They were made of slag, a stony waste matter separated from metals during the smelting or refining of ore. They were placed over a sand base and later locked together with even more sand.

Throughout the years some have been paved over with black top and others were just removed altogether and thrown in San Juan Bay. It’s actually a miracle that so many survived amid so many numb skull politicians.

To produce slag you have to have metallurgy going on and Puerto Rico abandoned this industry decades ago. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t be brought back for this specific purpose. God knows that we have more than enough scrap laying around from past industrial experiments. Add to that the devastation brought on by the past two hurricanes and the destruction produced by January’s earthquakes and you’d have plenty of raw material. We also have plenty of capable personnel and empty factory space of every size and shape.

So why not start a local metallurgic operation just to produce slag pavers? I don’t know if this is even viable, or how much it would pollute, but it’s certainly an idea worth exploring.

4. Money… it’s always about the money

I was going to discuss this aspect of the project last, but I can hear the collective yelling out there: “how is this guy proposing to pay for all this”? Well, here are a couple of ideas. And, by the way, they aren’t new either. Have you ever been to Disney World in Orlando? Have you seen the thousands of pavers that cover the square before entering Main Street USA? Have you noticed that each and every one of those pavers is personalized? That’s right!!! They all say something like “The Rivera Family, 1988”.

Unfortunately, the pavers used at Disney World were made of tile, and they’re slowly falling apart, so Disney management has announced that they will soon be removed. But what if they were made of slag? Slag is actually metal that could be laser etched. It could also last way longer than tile.

I honestly have no idea how many pavers it would take to repave Old San Juan. That’s the kind of question that maybe my friend Dr. Fernando Abru?a could answer. But let’s guess a number. Let’s guess that it would take half a million (500,000). Maybe that’s too much or too little. Once again, I don’t know. But it’s a nice round number and we have to start somewhere.

Now imagine selling each paver as a personalized item. You could sell personal pavers, family pavers and corporate pavers and place them accordingly throughout the city. To keep things affordable personal pavers could cost $25, family pavers $50 and corporate pavers $100. No one could buy more than 100 pavers. That way you wouldn’t have entire streets hogged up by corporate greed.

Now lets look at the numbers. 300,000 personal pavers sold at $25 a paver would bring in 7.5 million dollars. Another 100,000 family pavers sold at $50 would bring in an additional 5 million. And 100,000 pavers at $100 would bring in 10 million dollars. All together personalized pavers could bring in over 22 million dollars. Changing the distribution could make the final number even larger, so would more pavers if I underestimated my figures.

But wait, there’s more! What if you could sell advertising inside the micro buses, on the outside of the micro buses, inside the parking structure elevators and maybe even sell the naming of the structure like they do with arenas in the United States? Don’t you think that an airline, a cruise ship company (if there’s still any around) or a local bank could take the city up on the offer?

5. Repaving The Old City

Once again, I’m not an engineer, so I can’t speak of the actual intricacies that a project like this might entail. But one thing I do know. Once a street is repaved it would need to be closed to vehicular traffic PERMANENTLY. That means that a walkable Old San Juan would be a process rather than an event.

We have all seen what repaving and reopening looks like. Albeit that the most recent repaving seems to have been done with second rate materials. But regardless of what type of materials were used it’s obvious that repaving streets only to reopen them to vehicular traffic is sheer stupidity. Just take a walk along Fortaleza Street and you’ll see what I mean.

We have to get everyone on the same page and get them to understand that as a society we are destroying one of the Island’s greatest assets. Not to mention the fact that Old San Juan has tunnels underneath that crisscross the city and could cave under all that vehicular vibration. continue reading to learn about the other 5 steps ...