Some time ago, in a previous professional life, I had the occasion to spend a month working in Mexico City, which, as almost 25% of American high school students know, is located in Mexico. Mexico City in 1987 was a vibrant, exciting, fast-paced city with vibrant, exciting and fast-paced city traffic. I found the Mexican people to be uniformly warm, gracious, kind, generous and hospitable. Except when they got behind the wheel of their cars.

The average driver in Mexico City was aggressive, confrontational, oblivious to danger or the laws of motion and physics, and inordinately fond of the use of the horn as a communication device. Half the people on the road drove as if they are very late for a critically important appointment. The other half drove as if their underwear were stuffed with angry pinecones. Traffic lights and speed limit signs were viewed less as absolute limits on vehicular behavior and more as quaint suggestions or friendly recommendations.

The main drag in Mexico City contained a number of traffic circles that might have been helpful in controlling the speed and flow of traffic if most drivers hadn’t been using them primarily as opportunities to generate a little extra speed through the principles of centrifugal force. Watching the chaotic traffic flow around me as I walked along the sidewalk in Mexico City made me aware of both the importance and the futility of transportation planning in the modern world.

During the time I was there, the automobile population of Mexico City was made up of equal parts overloaded trucks, ancient vintage American muscle cars without much of their functioning muscles, and hoards of tiny but colorful mopeds that looked and sounded like hair dryers on wheels.

Most of the cars on the road looked like they had very recently spent some extended time on blocks, and few of them seem to handle very well on pavement, which is why so many of the drivers seemed to prefer to drive on the sidewalk. (With respect to pedestrians, the prevailing attitude among Mexico City drivers seemed to be the automotive equivalent of buyer beware).

Being either a driver or a passenger in a car in Mexico City’s daily commuter traffic was not something for the faint of heart. As you might imagine, I made sure that at all times I was wearing clean underwear and was carrying a set of my dental records in my briefcase.

I hadn’t thought much about the traffic in Mexico City for a long time until I read a news report recently about Mexico City starting a women-only bus service to protect female passengers from the groping that is common on the city’s packed public transportation system.

Millions of people cram into Mexico City’s subway trains and buses every day — Mexico City’s transit system carries twice as many riders as New York’s — and women have long complained of men taking advantage of the overcrowding to sneak in an inappropriate grab or pinch. The new buses will pull up at the same stops as the regular buses, but will have large pink “Women Only” signs on the front and side.

Besides taking me fondly back to my time in Mexico’s capital, that news item raised at least three questions for me.

First, I evidently didn’t get my money’s worth back when I rode Mexico City’s public transit system. Secondly, while I support the idea of a women-only, grope-free bus option, isn’t there a risk that a woman who decides she doesn’t have time to wait for the special pink bus and elects to ride the regular bus will be thereby deemed to have accepted, if not invited, the risk of being groped?

And third, if there can be special grope-free buses for women in Mexico, why can’t we have special ferries in Puget Sound catering to oppressed ferry minorities such as readers, nappers, people uninterested in listening in on private cell phone conversations from volume-insensitive passengers in adjoining chairs, or special crossings in which men in tank tops are banned? Or perhaps we could follow the lead of that German airline and designate one crossing a day as a clothing-optional run?

On second thought, I think I’ll take my chances with the Mexico City traffic.

Tom Tyner writes a weekly humor column for this newspaper. This is from his “Classic’s File.”