"Our cities are becoming less and less habitable, with traffic unbearably horrible, and mobility unbearably difficult."
"Our cities are becoming less and less habitable, with traffic unbearably horrible, and mobility unbearably difficult."
Some very drastic measures have to be undertaken by government to relieve people in mega-cities of the daily traffic problem that bedevils their lives.
I was in Davao to open, along with my TECO counterpart, Representative Michael Pei-yung Hsu and TAITRA Chairman James Huang the second Taiwan Expo in the Philippines last Friday, November 8. It will be recalled that the first Taiwan Expo was held in Manila, at the SMX Convention Center in the MOA bay area on September 2017, and it was a very big success.
The ceremonies having been finished, my MECO team went to the former Daratex compound in Toril, just about 10 kilometers from the SMX Center in Lanang, Davao City. Going through the diversion road, the trip to Daliao in Toril took us as about 40 minutes, but going back to City Hall from the former Davao Ramie Textile center, a shorter seven or eight kilometer distance, took us an hour.
Part of the reason is the construction of a bridge widening project before reaching Matina, the nearest district west of the big city that Davao is. Still, a non-resident of the president’s home city could not but notice the number of vehicles that ply its main thoroughfares. Davao after all is where so many roads to the west, from Davao City’s western districts to Davao del Sur and the Cotabato provinces, to the northern provinces and cities of Bukidnon and Cagayan de Oro, as well as to the northeastern Agusan and Surigao provinces all converge, for business and people movement.
So many vehicles; so narrow thoroughfares. So many people, all converging on the true capital of the country over the last three years and a half, and for the next years and months before 2022.
Of course, if Mayor Inday Sara Duterte runs, and wins the presidency after her father in May 2022, the number of visitors from the rest of the country and even abroad would multiply even more.
But Davao’s huge territory is an advantage other mega-cities do not have—land. Thus, there is a coastal road being built, and so many diversion roads leading to the city’s mountain barangays. Traffic problems, after all the construction, are solvable.
They tell me the same traffic condition obtains in Cagayan de Oro, which is many times smaller than Davao City, a narrow stretch of land hemmed in by the Bukidnon highlands and the Mindanao Sea.
I go to Cebu City, which along with Lapu-lapu and Mandaue cities, comprise what Metro Cebu, a mega-city complex populated by almost 2 million with daily transients working or doing business in it numbering another half a million.
Cebu City is a narrow strip of land with a huge mountain area whereas population is concentrated on that narrow strip bounded by the sea.
To and from the business center in Lahug or the political center in Fuente Osmena and the Mactan International Airport should take you 40 minutes at night, or double that time during rush hours. There are times when traversing the less-than-two-kilometer stretch from the Ayala Center to Waterfront Hotel in Lahug would take half an hour.
Our cities are becoming less and less habitable, with traffic unbearably horrible, and mobility unbearably difficult.
Try Baguio City, or Dagupan, or Angeles City in Pampanga, even Cabanatuan and Talavera in Nueva Ecija, and imagine how few more years it would take before mobility becomes impossible all over the country.
When will we ever stop licensing and registering more motor vehicles? And when are we going to complete all those planned mass transport systems that would make it more practical for people to travel through them rather than buy a car? Meanwhile, what?
As it is, our mega-cities are bursting at the seams, with migrants from the countryside preferring to find livelihood in them, on top of a baby boom that is much too high for the carrying capacity of our many islands with a total land area smaller than the State of California.
And then, travelling by land from Davao to Butuan in Agusan del Norte to visit my mother’s grave, we passed through hectares of hectares of sparsely populated and un-cultivated land. Land where vegetable crops could be planted for nutritional food, yet laying idle due to idleness. Sayang.
We eat too much rice because we eat too few vegetables, which are expensive for our poor people, who thrive instead on “unli” rice and sodium-laden tuyo or bagoong (bulad and ginamos in Visayan) to flavor the carbo-loading.
Still, Mindanaoans are looking forward to better times. Because we now have, at long last, a president from Mindanao, Luzon’s oft-repeated but niggardly implemented promises for its 24 million residents are now coming to fruition.
In the Davao provinces as in the Cotabatos, the Agusans, the Surigaos, I have witnessed through the past three years so much progress brought about by new infrastructure.
While traffic in the national capital region is a nightmarish bane, with solutions still far from realization, in the once-forgotten “land of promise,” traffic is considered a consequence of true progress, and people grin and bear the temporary inconveniences because they know that once all the construction is done, life will be better.
