This branch models one narrow slice of a big statute: the judicial process for a vehicle collision that reaches a Juzgado de Tránsito — not tickets, not licenses, not damages math. It's also the newest branch on this site, built from scratch rather than corrected from an earlier draft.
Costa Rica's traffic law is the Ley de Tránsito por Vías Públicas Terrestres y Seguridad Vial, enacted as Ley N.º 9078 and in force since October 4, 2012. It's a large statute — north of 236 articles — covering a lot that has nothing to do with a courtroom: driver's licensing, vehicle registration, the technical rules of the road, the catalog of administrative traffic tickets (boletas) COSEVI issues, and the mechanics of collecting the fines that follow.
This branch doesn't attempt any of that. It models exactly one narrow slice: the judicial track that runs when a vehicle-collision case reaches a Juzgado de Tránsito — from the parte oficial that opens a case, through comparecencia, hearing, sentencia, and appeal, to archive or prescription. It doesn't touch administrative ticket handling, license administration, or civil damages calculation.
This is a genesis schema. Every other jurisdiction branch on cr-nammu.ai has a correction story — an earlier rev00 mapping checked against the official text and revised into rev01. This branch doesn't have that story, because there was no rev00 to correct — it was built from the ground up, against the primary source, from the start. The verification obligations, and the gate at the end, are the same either way: nothing here is presented as attorney-reviewed.
This page describes source grounding, not legal advice. It tells you what our system reads, from where, and how confidently we've checked it read the right thing. Nothing here substitutes for review by a licensed Costa Rican attorney.
SCIJ's "full consolidated text" view of Ley 9078 truncates well before reaching this branch's procedural articles — confirmed to cut off around arts. 55–58, long before Título V, Capítulo V even starts. Every governing article behind this pipeline was fetched individually through SCIJ's per-article endpoint, not pulled from the bulk view.
| # | Phase | Art. | Mechanism |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Parte oficial / boleta | 158, 168 | The official report that opens a collision matter, and the underlying boleta mechanism that can trigger it. |
| 2 | Competencia / partes | 167, 169 | Which Juzgado de Tránsito has jurisdiction, and who counts as a party — including the imputado. |
| 3 | Expediente + gravamen | 170, 171, 200 | The case file opens and is forwarded; a judicial annotation (gravamen) can be placed against a vehicle's registration. |
| 4 | Notificación al propietario | 172 | The vehicle's registered owner — who may not be the driver — is formally notified and given a window to appear. |
| 5 | Comparecencia | 173, 174 | The imputado's own window to appear, plus the formal advertencias the court must give. |
| 6 | Conciliación | 178 | A settlement or arreglo track available before the matter proceeds to a full hearing. |
| 7 | Audiencia / prueba | 179–184 | The oral hearing: evidence offering and admission, peritajes, and procedural rulings including on rejected evidence. |
| 8 | Sentencia | 185 | First-instance judgment, including the condena en abstracto mechanism — see handoffs below. |
| 9 | Apelación | 186 | Appeal of the sentencia or an auto, resolved by a judge sitting in second instance. |
| 10 | Archivo / prescripción | 187, 190–191 | Case closure, and the prescription/interruption rules that apply across the whole pipeline. |
| 11 | Supletorio | 188, 189 | Validity-of-acts rules, and the express bridge to the Código Procesal Penal for gaps Ley 9078 doesn't fill. |
Confidence, named honestly: most articles were live-fetched and are tagged SINALEVI_VERIFIED / HIGH. Six remain MEDIUM — flagged for re-verification before this branch moves toward attorney sign-off, not rounded up:
procedimiento_ordinario pipeline rather than characterizing criminal-law questions itself.In scope — judicial track
Secciones IV–V, arts. 167–191 + 200: the process before a Juzgado de Tránsito once a collision matter is filed judicially.
Out of scope — administrative track
Secciones I–III, arts. 158–166: COSEVI boletas, automated enforcement, and administrative appeals (art. 164 anchors its own supletorio link to general administrative law).
This branch's version of "two tracks, don't merge them": the system must never apply COSEVI's administrative appeal deadlines to a judicial-track document, or vice versa. The one place the tracks touch is art. 158 — the boleta itself, cited purely as an entry point explaining how a judicial matter can begin.
Three design choices here are non-negotiable — the same directness we use for the penal branch's presunción de inocencia guardrail. These are boundaries by design, not gaps waiting to be closed.
The system does not determine fault in a collision. Fault is for the juez de tránsito to decide, after the audiencia, on the evidence presented there.
The system does not calculate or state a damages amount, not even when a sentencia has established the abstract right to compensation under art. 185(d).
The system does not assume a judicial lien on a vehicle (arts. 171, 200) has been lifted unless an explicit order — sentencia, archivo, or conciliación — says so.
| Deadline | Art. | Window | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Comparecencia del imputado | 173 | 10 días hábiles | crítica |
| Apelación de sentencia o auto | 186 | 3 días hábiles | crítica |
| Deadline | Art. | Window | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Remisión de boleta a la autoridad | 158 | 72 horas | alta |
| Ventana del propietario para apersonarse | 172 | 10 días | alta |
| Revocatoria de rechazo de prueba | 179 | 3 días | alta |
| Prescripción de la acción por colisión | 190 | 2 años | alta |
We'd rather an expert reader check our work than take it on faith. Everything above traces back to the Sistema Nacional de Legislación Vigente (SINALEVI), published through Costa Rica's Procuraduría General de la República at pgrweb.go.cr/scij.
Law number 9078 (internal SCIJ id nValor2=73504). Per-article fetches use SCIJ's internal instance id 125198.
This branch tags articles HIGH or MEDIUM at the schema level. At the chunk level, verified content carries a SINALEVI_VERIFIED tag — described in the underlying spec as a documentary alias of HIGH. That's narrower than how our civil-law sources page uses the same term.
As of this writing, nothing on this page has reached ATTORNEY_VERIFIED status. This genesis branch has that same sign-off gate ahead of it that each of the other five on this site already passed through.
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