Have you ever endured Metro Manila’s nightmarish traffic that you spent three hours going to your destination and three hours going back?
Have you ever seen a movie, which you enjoyed, but gotten stuck in traffic that by the end of the evening you were once again stressed and hungry?
I have. And on that Friday evening, the traffic was made worse by the rain.
So what can be done to ease the ordeal of Metro Manila’s residents?
With 350,000 vehicles getting registered every year, the situation is bound to get worse. Metro Manila will remain a big parking lot.
I believe that Transportation Secretary Arthur Tugade is committed to his job of making traffic bearable for all. He seeks emergency powers for the President so the latter could open up gated subdivisions near Edsa and ban provincial buses from using terminals along Edsa, among others. There are also plans to build subways and expressways. Still, these are just plans that could take years to build.
I think these problems are symptomatic of a bigger problem. Consider these:
The National Capital Region has an area of 622 square kilometers, more or less, and is populated by nearly 13 million people. It has a road system of only 5,000 kilometers. There are 2,101,148 registered vehicles as of 2013. And, if you look at the map of the NCR, it is locked in between Manila Bay and Laguna de Bay.
My gulay, with some 6,000 buses coming in and out of Edsa, not counting the jeepneys, the taxicabs, the Uber and Grab vehicles, everybody is fighting for space in a small corridor like the NCR.
Solutions to the traffic situation are not just short-term.
I have been a journalist for over 66 years. I know there used to be plans to extend a so-called Pacific Highway from Cagayan and Isabela provinces all the way to Nueva Vizcaya, Nueva Ecija, Aurora and Quezon province. There was also a plan to construct a highway to connect Metro Manila to the Sierra Madre mountains.
These plans were meant to decongest the small corridor of the NCR and propel the growth and development of the Pacific Corridor. They are grandiose and ambitious plans, but still doable and practical.
While I agree that government may be short of money to implement all these plans, there are always the Public-Private Partnership program and foreign loans to rely on.
* * *
Embattled Senator Leila de Lima gave us some comic relief when she shot back at President Duterte after the latter said she would go to jail, for “screwing not only her driver but the nation as well.”
De Lima shot back, asking Duterte if he had a crush on her, adding “What do you see in me that you find so sexual? Why is your mind in my sexual aspect? You are so obsessed with me. Why?”
When I heard De Lima saying it over television, I could not stop laughing!
Still, the fight is uneven considering the awesome powers of the President. Worse, this is no laughing matter because the drug trade at the New Bilibid Prison is serious.
The Senate inquiry on extrajudicial killings has spawned collateral problems like the Davao Death Squad and the trade of drugs within prison walls. How this came about during the six years of BS Aquino as President should be looked into. It is obvious that it proliferated during the past administration.
If De Lima is truly guilty as charged, being only the alter ego of BS Aquino III, the real culprit should also be charged for not lifting a finger to stop the drug trade within prison walls. That’s how I see it.
* * *
Amid injustice, President Duterte asks: Where is God?
This was asked by Du30 in defending his preference for the reimposition of the death penalty. “The problem is, I ask you, what if there is no God?
“When a one-year-old or an 18-month-old baby, is taken from the mother’s arms, brought under a jeep and raped and killed, where is God?”
The President could well have asked where was God when all the bad things in history were happening.
Our problem as human beings is that we think God, who is infinite, thinks like a finite being. This is where faith comes in”•faith in God doing the right things. And faith is a gift.
That’s why I say to President Duterte, if you have faith in God, you should not be asking this question at all.