One of the Dominican Republic’s sitting legislators has issued a urgent public call for national intervention to address a spiraling traffic crisis that has rendered daily life unsustainable in the country’s premier tourist destination, Punta Cana. Senator Rafael Barón Duluc, who represents the province of La Altagracia and has operated a local office in the Verón-Punta Cana district for more than a decade, revealed that growing gridlock has gotten so severe that he and his team are actively considering relocating their operations out of the region’s central Downtown area. In stark comments highlighting the severity of the situation, Duluc compared the area’s congestion to that of the Dominican capital — and found Punta Cana faring far worse, noting that persistent traffic snarls regularly stretch for multiple kilometers across key corridors. The senator laid out the tangible impact of the crisis on tourism, one of the Dominican Republic’s core economic drivers: what was once a 10-minute quick trip between Punta Cana International Airport and local area hotels now takes an average of 40 minutes, with wait times climbing as high as a full hour during peak commuting hours or periods of high travel volume. Duluc also pointed to already visible private-sector responses that underscore how critical the problem has become: local private industry was forced to fund and build a new overpass not just as a convenience, but as an absolute necessity to keep premium tourist zones accessible. The gridlock is no longer confined to residential neighborhoods, he explained, it has spread deep into the country’s most valuable tourism corridors. The legislator also publicly defended prominent industry figure Frank Rainieri, whose recent comments about the traffic crisis went viral online and drew widespread backlash. According to Duluc, Rainieri’s remarks were prudent, measured, and rooted in unvarnished truth about the area’s infrastructure failures. In closing, Duluc emphasized that the growing gridlock in Punta Cana is not an isolated provincial problem — it is a national issue that demands immediate attention from national leadership, rooted in longstanding systemic urban planning failures that have not been addressed. To drive that point home, he urged national officials to launch an on-the-ground assessment: fly a drone over the area during peak rush hour, he suggested, and policy makers will see first-hand the scope of the crisis that local residents and business leaders face every day.
Traffic chaos in Punta Cana: traffic jams surpass those in the capital
