From early morning until late at night, fume-belching buses sweep around the fountain, picking up passengers, negotiating log-jams and stopping for the odd half-hour rest.

The population of 120,000 just about doubles under the invasion of vacationers in fume-belching touring buses and other instruments of transportation.

Each weekend thousands pile into cars and fume-belching buses for the 30-mile trip to Puerto de la Libertad, a former port and a surfer's paradise.

A throng of mostly small cars hoot and jostle in a race against three-wheeled auto-rickshaws, dilapidated buses, fume-belching lorries and the odd bullock cart.

Many button bosses have poured money into a 33-story luxury apartment building, now under construction, that is surrounded by farmland, with polluted streams and fume-belching factories in the background.

No sideswiping taxis, no fume-belching buses, no zigzagging skaters, no oblivious jaywalkers, no manic bike messengers.

Now he has plans for public transport: a fleet of 40,000 fume-belching buses, he says, will be overhauled and two commuter rail lines built with the help of private contractors.

By breakfast time, 10,000 freshly washed, gleaming cars (including mine) were ranged in a stagnant, fume-belching motorcade extending from the outskirts of Tokyo to the foot of Mount Fuji.

And I only hope that in the end our roads will become so clogged with all these fume-belching cars and lorries that everyone will give them up and start going by train again.

The statue dedication ceremony - a rededication ceremony, really, since the statue has been there for nearly 99 years - took place in the center of Columbus Circle, right there between four lanes of horn-honking taxis and fume-belching buses.

New York City, with its convoys of cabs, miles of subway track, fleets of fume-belching trucks and hordes of harried commuters, is a long way from Davis, Calif., with a University of California campus and not much else.

The stock market will surge, shop shutters will be rolled up, pavements will bustle, and Waiyaki Way, Uhuru Highway and the Mombasa and Ngong roads will once more witness a series of hair-raising, fume-belching, eye-watering contests involving man and machine.