Thursday night, our Manila office employees had a small Christmas party in Makati, just about 700 meters from our Salcedo Village office, so most walked to the venue. Many were unable to have their families arrive on time, if at all. Some kids arrived two hours late. The usual culprit was —traffic.
I live near where Malate in Manila folds into Palanan in Makati, about 15 minutes away via normal speed on a traffic-less Sunday to the Makati Commercial Center. Fetching my granddaughter in the house and bringing her along with my driver and his daughter from the De La Salle area to Makati Avenue took us all of one hour. Good thing we left at 5:30 and arrived at 6:30 that evening, right on time.
This of course is the new normal. Whenever I am in Manila, I have to give an hour’s leeway from house to office. There are days when I use up an hour and 15 minutes to travel a distance of just about five kilometers.
An officemate who lives in Antipolo City travels two hours minimum each day from home to office and another two, sometimes more, back in the evening. He has mastered every possible route to and fro, but still, it is two hours. On days when we have to leave for Taipei, which is normally half past noon, he has to leave Antipolo at six to make sure he gets to Naia on time.
Sadly, there is no way but to use a car, or get an Uber, from Antipolo to Naia. One cannot lug heavy suitcases into a bus going to North Avenue, then transfer to the MRT to get to Baclaran, then transfer to a taxi to Naia. There is a woeful lack of public transport available for the ordinary citizen, the result of several decades of neglect, absolutely no forward planning by government, especially in the last 10 years or so of the miserable Metro Manilan’s life.
One only has to look at the long queues in decrepit MRT and LRT stations to see the agony people have to go through day-in and day-out, five or six days a week.
One only has to see how so many empty or near-empty privately owned passenger buses snake-in and out of Edsa or Taft or Quezon Avenue every single day, stopping in the middle of the street whenever a solitary passenger could be picked up. One only has to get his hands hurt blowing his horn at intersections where public conveyances like rusting, obviously antediluvian jeepneys hug street corners (whether busy Buendia corner Taft or still busy Estrada corner Leon Guinto), obliviously await for passengers and let all the other vehicles freeze on the road till hell freezes over, and the nearby traffic aide or barangay tanod just looks askance, obviously bribed. One only has to be terrified at “padyak” contraptions and tricycles suddenly appearing counter-flow (especially in Manila) ferrying students too lazy to walk from their school a few steps away from where they double-parked their cars with the help of barangay tanods, whose daily survival depends on the number of cars they get to park.
I live in an area which used to be conveniently close to church, school and everywhere else, which was why my mother bought the property more than 50 years ago, a once-genteel place with old grace now jampacked with high rises standing cheek and jowl to cater to students of three elite schools whose administrators insist on expanding upon every single inch of Manila territory instead of being forced to move out to suburbia if only local and national governments had any sense of zoning and a sane land use policy.
I cringe at how our transportation officials are cursed every single day, on air courtesy of radio commentators, and under their breath by exasperated commuters and private motorists, for a problem seemingly beyond human solution but whose cause, to put it very succinctly, is—human numbers as in population beyond the carrying capacity of the metropolis where everything is bunched up, and human predilection for buying private vehicles, partly aspirational, and partly necessitated by the lack of dependable public transport.
Yet both the case of human numbers and the case of too many motor vehicles is really a case of the lack of vision and forward planning by a State which has the power to compel and influence human behavior and human consumption patterns.
There’s just way too many of us, and there’s way too many people crammed in the metropolis called NCR, as well as in Metro Cebu, Cagayan de Oro, and even Davao.
And there are way too many vehicles on the road.
Past leaders forgot all about trains, and allowed PNR to rot. Marcos put up the LRT 1, which has since expanded into another route called LRT 2, and then a private consortium put up MRT along Edsa. But clearly all these are not enough for a population that’s just way too big. Worse, these train systems and their maintenance have been left to rot in the last six years or so.
Immediately-needed solutions like constructing new train systems, a bus rapid transit system, a subway perhaps—all these will take time to complete, even if we had the public resources to do so, or even if China and Japan and whoever else will grant us loan facilities.
There is a crying need to reduce the number of vehicles on the road, or stop them from multiplying as fast as any Juan, Petra or Dodong can afford the low down payments to fulfill his aspirational car.
The Department of Finance has proposed additional taxes on motor vehicles both to raise revenues as well as to put the brakes on vehicle multiplication on our road systems. I propose adopting the COE—certificate of entitlement—system as in Singapore. You need one, which you pay to government, before you can buy a car. The more luxurious the brand or the bigger the engine displacement, the more you pay.
You can’t tell the banks to increase the interest on consumer financing, as they are awash with cash. That would run contrary to the law of supply and demand.
Make it more expensive for anyone to buy a car or other motor vehicle. Oppressive? Maybe, but then again, no other way in the meantime that we wait for public infrastructure to bloom.
On the medium and long-term, let’s (1) effectively and implement a population management policy while (2) seriously planning to move the seat of government from Metro Manila to elsewhere.
And please, Congress, pass the emergency powers bill into law soonest.
By the way, as I have been traveling a lot the past months, I must congratulate our Naia manager and our Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines director-general for relatively less downtime waiting for planes to depart and arrive at our international gateway. We wish you the best.
