Paraguay Roads and Vehicles
A trolley in Asunción
Courtesy Tim Merrill
Construction work on the Trans-Chaco Highway
Courtesy Inter-American Development Bank
The lack of an adequate road system was one of the largest
structural obstacles to more rapid and more evenly distributed
development in the 1980s. As in the economy at large, Paraguay had
made great strides in highway construction, increasing the road
network from fewer than 1,000 kilometers after World War II to more
than 15,000 kilometers in the late 1980s. Road construction,
primarily the task of the Ministry of Public Works and
Communications, increased steadily in the 1970s, representing about
25 percent of public-sector investment in that decade. But Paraguay
still lacked an adequate network of paved roads. In the late 1980s,
only 20 percent of the country's roads were paved, and the
remaining 80 percent were mostly dirt roads, easily flooded and
often impassible during inclement weather. Only three paved
highways extended well into the interior from the capital.
In the 1980s, the completion of two major highway construction
projects facilitated travel from Asunción to Argentina and Brazil.
The other major thoroughfare in the country was the 700-kilometer
Trans-Chaco Highway, one of the government's principal attempts to
develop the Chaco region. Construction progressed slowly, however,
and in the late 1980s only about half of the road had been paved.
Most vehicles could not complete the trek to the Upper Chaco. The
government was also building feeder roads to allow the transport of
agricultural goods. Feeder road construction was very slow in many
areas, and private agribusinesses sometimes built their own roads.
The number of registered vehicles quadrupled from 1975 to 1985
as a result of the growing road network, the strong performance of
agriculture, and general economic growth. There were roughly 40,000
automobiles registered in Paraguay in the late 1980s, one-sixth of
which ran on "alco-nafta," an ethanol-enhanced fuel. Other vehicles
included 2,000 taxis, 3,000 buses, and more than 20,000 each of
trucks, pickups, and motorcycles. Public transportation, including
buses and streetcars, were widely used in Asunción, but service was
limited in rural areas, especially in the Chaco. New bus terminals
were built in the 1980s and bus routes expanded, particularly to
accommodate the increased demand by bus-driven tourists. The
trucking industry played an expanding role in the country's
transportation. According to Paraguay's Chamber of Exporters, by
1982, about 62 percent of registered exports left the country on
the road system, mostly by truck.
Data as of December 1988
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