Playa del Carmen Councilor Votes Against Mototaxi Agreement With Imoveqroo

Playa del Carmen, Quintana Roo — A Playa del Carmen city councilor voted against a collaboration agreement between the municipal government and the Quintana Roo Mobility Institute (Imoveqroo) to regularize mototaxis, saying the terms for defining concessions are unclear.

Councilor Juan Novelo Zapata cast the dissenting vote as the agreement won majority approval during the 26th Extraordinary Cabildo Session. He argued that under the deal the municipality would do the regulating while the state collected the revenue.

He said he did not have enough time to analyze the agreement presented during the session.

“What I argued was that it does not have a clear definition. In this case there are three polygons they intend to create, and it does not specify how many mototaxis each association should have. If you look at Avenida 115 by the Oxxo, we have a huge number of mototaxis; here around the Palacio, there are almost 30 or 40 parked,” he said.

Not Against Drivers, But Against the Terms

Novelo Zapata made clear he is not opposed to his fellow councilors, and even less to the mototaxi drivers who go out every day to earn a living and support their families. His objection, he said, is that Imoveqroo needs to take on full authority to regulate the service instead of leaving the administrative burden to the municipality, which handles signage, transport rules and the stops used by passengers — in short, the municipality spends and the state collects.

“The Mobility Institute has been around for more than four years and has not managed to regularize Uber, and now they want to come and regularize mototaxis. On the contrary, they haven’t sorted out Uber and now they want to come and sort us out here. That is to say, no — we don’t have two directorates so they can do the work. So what use are the two transport and mobility directorates? What good are they? We need to generate results and have the municipality really do its job, that’s what we want,” he emphasized.

He also criticized the Mobility Institute for focusing only on the municipal seat and ignoring Playa del Carmen’s indigenous communities, whose residents lack transport to reach their workplaces — a task, he noted, that is left to the municipality.