Dominican Republic and Haiti: Country Studies

The Tavera Dam
Courtesy Inter-American Development Bank
sion since the 1950s, has been growing at a much faster rate
since the late 1980s because of the booming tourist industry
(see fig. 4) Roads are the most common medium of travel, and
.
the national road network, which in the late 1990s totals more
than 17,200 kilometers, is considered extensive by Caribbean
standards. However, most roadways are narrow and flood easily.
Moreover, 80 percent of all feeder roads had completely deteriorated
by the mid-1980s because of lack of funding for badly
needed maintenance and repair work. In the mid-1980s,
steadily worsening road conditions prompted the World Bank
and the Inter-American Development Bank to finance a program
to develop better maintenance systems. However, Dominican
road conditions remained poor well into the early 1990s.
It was not until the late 1990s that a major road construction
program was undertaken to develop intercity routes and urban
projects in Santo Domingo. More than 470,700 vehicles were in
use in 1997, including some 266,100 private cars and 133,610
trucks—compared with 405,000 in 1996 and about 242,000 in
1991.
In 1997 the Dominican Republic boasted a 1,600-kilometer
railroad system, one of the longest in the Caribbean, compared
with 325 kilometers in the mid-1980s. Although the CEA owns
a substantial portion of the country's railroad system, several
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