Tulum Bypass Highway Axed After Years of Delays

TULUM, Quintana Roo — Following a negative response four years ago, a stalled application process, and an apparent sanction for unauthorized land clearing, Mexico's Secretariat of Infrastructure, Communications, and Transportation (SICT) has withdrawn its request for environmental authorization for the Tulum city bypass highway construction project.

The project involves building a 26-kilometer highway with three grade-separated interchanges, designed to route through traffic from the Chetumal-Cancún highway around the "Pueblo Mágico" on its western side. The planned route runs between kilometer 218 of the highway, south of the city towards Felipe Carrillo Puerto, and kilometer 243, north of the city towards Playa del Carmen.

A Project Stalled for Years

This is an idea that has been promoted for at least 15 years but has failed to materialize. One reason is that the federal government has not allocated a budget; it received initial environmental authorization in 2011, but the work was never executed, causing the permit to lapse. Another significant reason is that the city of Tulum is surrounded by five protected natural areas, three of which were newly created during the administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (Jaguar, Felipe Carrillo Puerto, and Chunyaxché). The SICT was required to provide information on the project's potential environmental impacts on these areas, as it necessitates a change of land use for 149.6 hectares, with 39.6 hectares subject to jungle clearing.

The withdrawal of the application was requested on September 25, and the Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources (Semarnat) accepted it on October 2.

Unexplained Withdrawal Following Stalled Process

The SICT did not express the specific reasons that led it to withdraw the application for the Tulum bypass highway project authorization. It only generically indicated that it was doing so because it served the interests of the federal agency.

However, it is noteworthy that the Environmental Impact Assessment (MIA) for the project had been stalled for three years. It began in May 2021 and was frozen as of March 2022, with no new steps in the process since then, according to the procedure record included in the cancellation resolution.

Prior Illegal Clearing and a Previous Rejection

Furthermore, it is also worth recalling that in April of this year, environmentalists and speleologists from the Riviera Maya accused the Secretariat of National Defense (Sedena) and the SICT of the clandestine opening of a path through the jungle and over caves and underground rivers of the Sac Actun system. This path coincides with the layout of the northern half of the bypass project, from the Playa del Carmen-Tulum section, near the town of Jacinto Pat, to the Tulum-Cobá highway, near Rancho Viejo, in the municipality of Tulum.

Following the complaint, the illegal land clearing was shut down by the Federal Attorney for Environmental Protection (Profepa), which confirmed the removal of vegetation in a medium-height sub-perennial rainforest ecosystem with the presence of the protected chit palm species. "It is necessary for those carrying out this work to present their environmental impact authorization and for a change of land use and removal in a forest zone," the agency stated at the time, without specifying who was responsible for the devastation of the jungle vegetation area.

On another front, the SICT had already submitted an MIA in June 2020 to resume the Tulum bypass project, but Semarnat rejected it because it could not explain how the project would avoid affecting the Sian Ka'an Biosphere Reserve, the only protected natural area in the immediate vicinity at the time, alongside the Tulum National Park.

"The proponent, despite foreseeing actions aimed at the correct disposal of waste (solid, liquid, and hazardous), supervision of groundwater quality, among other measures; does not ensure that the project's activities would not disturb this Protected Natural Area (ANP) and its respective zone of influence," stated Semarnat in April 2021, when it denied authorization to the SICT. That resolution on the previous project added that the construction of the bypass "does not guarantee the conservation or maintenance of the biodiversity of said ANP."

Project Justifications and Costs

In the second MIA, processed in May 2021 and published in the Environmental Gazette in August of the same year, the SICT recognizes that the problem of road infrastructure construction is generally associated with the idea of ecosystem fragmentation. However, it justifies that in the case of the new Tulum bypass highway, its main objective is to relieve traffic, both light and heavy, from the municipal seat.

It is considered necessary to alleviate vehicle traffic in the Tulum population center because, being traversed by the main communication route between Cancún and Chetumal, it already experiences significant traffic jams, caused mainly by cargo vehicles, which hinder the economic and tourist activities of the municipality, the project states.

Furthermore, it would achieve savings in travel time and operating costs for long-distance transit, as well as provide efficiency to the road network and connect and integrate the involved localities (located between Playa del Carmen, Cobá, and Felipe Carrillo Puerto, primarily) and neighboring municipalities. This would allow for the development of these communities through efficient communication routes, curb the lack of services and marginalization that exists in many localities in this area, and facilitate tourist flow.

In the MIA presented in 2021, the required investment was estimated at 972 million 98 thousand pesos, but by 2025 these costs are already outdated and last year were estimated at over 1.2 billion pesos.

For the time being, the long-awaited Tulum bypass project has been removed from the SICT's immediate plans, until further notice.