A Simple Idea in Jalisco Could Take Cars Off One of Guadalajara’s Busiest Roads

Sometimes solving a traffic problem doesn’t require another highway.

Tlajomulco is moving ahead with a school transportation program designed in part to reduce traffic on the López Mateos corridor, one of the Guadalajara metropolitan area’s notoriously congested routes.

As of September 4, three schools had already joined the project, with the first routes expected to begin operating during the third or fourth week of September, according to reporting by El Informador.

The concept is pretty straightforward.

Instead of hundreds of parents making separate school runs twice a day, organized transportation can move groups of students together.

The real test, of course, will be participation.

A school-bus program only reduces traffic if enough families actually use it, and I could not find verified projections showing exactly how many cars the current program is expected to remove from López Mateos.

So it’s too early to call it a solution.

But it is an interesting experiment.

For people in Puerto Vallarta, the underlying idea should sound familiar. Traffic problems aren’t limited to Guadalajara. Vallarta and Bahía de Banderas are also growing, and school drop-offs, commuting patterns and concentrated rush-hour travel all contribute to congestion.

Big infrastructure projects certainly have their place.

But sometimes cities can improve mobility by asking a simpler question:

Do all of us really need to make the same trip in separate cars?

Tlajomulco is about to find out.

Source: El Informador, September 4, 2026.