Traveling to Costa Rica, Should I Drive in San Jose?

If you are planning to travel to Costa Rica and rent a car , it is best if you do not drive in San Jose. The traffic is extremely congested with  many large  buses everywhere.  You can’t read the street and avenue names because they are rubbed off the sides of buildings where they  were once written. It’s hard to determine one way streets.  San Jose is not a well planned city so a common sense approach to directions don’t work there.

Then what do I do?  Best is to hire a taxi to drive you into San Jose.  Or,  you can take a public bus into the city from all the surrounding towns and once you are there, hire a taxi-which is inexpensive.

Rush hour around San Jose is bad, so avoid it if you can.  Between hours of  7 a.m. until around 8:45 a.m.   Then 4:30 p.m. until 7:  p.m.

There is only one main highway from San Jose to the international airport which is the Pan American highway also known as highway 1.  This road continues north all the way into Nicaragua.  Plan plenty of time to get from San Jose to the international airport.  Traffic is always heavy along this strip of highway 1.

What do I do if I need to drive my rental car thru San Jose to get to the highway to Limon  and on to the Caribbean  beaches?   Answer: what I did was hire a taxi to lead me thru San Jose to the road to Limon.    I tried it on my own and  very quickly got lost!   I tried  reading a map  of San Jose which proved of no help.  (Because many of the streets do not have names)