“My professor once defined traffic as the consequence of transport and land use.”
Last week, the new Metropolitan Manila Development Authority management held a traffic summit to once again try to come up with new ideas on how to tame Metro Manila’s monstrous traffic gridlock.
We had a traffic respite for the last couple of years due to the pandemic but traffic is now back to pre-pandemic levels. Hence, the need for some traffic amelioration programs is more urgent than ever. After the summit attended by all stakeholders, the MMDA released to the media some of the plans that the agency is considering for implementation.
Predictably, not everyone is happy about it. By the looks of it, the plan is not new but a recalibration of the existing number coding program with the end in view of increasing the number of vehicles that will be taken off the road. For instance, MMDA wants to implement a modified odd and even scheme to get 50 per cent of vehicles of the road. It also wants to add two ending numbers to the current number coding scheme so that 40 per cent of all vehicles will be taken off the road.
These two schemes look complicated and confusing and will be more difficult to implement. And why choose Wednesday for a free day? Why not Sunday instead? Not a good idea. Wanting more vehicles off the road is understandable but these two programs is too punishing to all those who will be affected. Odd and even schemes have been implemented in other countries before but only for short durations and never for long periods. Taking fifty or forty per cent of the vehicles off the will have a big effect on the economy which the government could ill afford. Besides, MMDA did not say in the report whether these two programs will be for all vehicles or simply for privately owned vehicles.
Why is this important? Because the buses, jeepneys, taxi cabs and others according to recent government data only occupies 30 percent of the road space but carries the bulk of the ridership. Privately owned vehicles on the other hand occupies 67 per cent of road space while carrying only about thirty-two per cent of the ridership. We do not know whether this was factored into the MMDA planning.
The old number coding scheme is good enough and should be maintained. Being able to take 20 per cent of all vehicles off the road is a lot if implemented thoroughly without exceptions and should be for the whole day. What the MMDA wants to do is to device a formula to ease traffic by simply taking vehicles off the road. MMDA must surely understand that any vehicle reduction program must be supplemented with other programs. One of these as already mentioned by MMDA is exploiting technology to aide in the enforcement of violations. Adding a thousand CCTVs in strategic areas throughout the Metro area for instance will go a long way in helping in clearing the roads of illegally parked vehicles.
Another is modernizing the antiquated traffic signaling system. Trouble is, the MMDA does not seem to want to undertake old and tried labor intensive solutions to alleviate traffic. MMDA can start by doing an honest-to-goodness survey of all Metro roads to find out the roads that are already unusable to vehicles because these roads are either being used for commerce or for residential purposes. MMDA should not be so fixated by traffic along EDSA because it is not the only road in the metro.
Four-day work weeks will also limit movement and thus affect the economy. What we want is to keep everybody moving but seeing to it that the road system is used as efficiently as possible. This is one of the big problems of traffic in the NCR— the inefficient use of roads. I quite understand the immensity of MMDA’s problems. How can we really solve the traffic in a Metropolitan area populated by 13.45 million people living in an area of only 619 square kilometers? The road system in the Metropolitan area is also totally inadequate to accommodate the burgeoning vehicle population which is worsening the vehicle to road density to about 550 vehicles per kilometer of road. It is a terrifying prospect for all transport and traffic planners.
I remember my old university professor years ago defining traffic as the consequence of transport and land use. It is so simple a definition yet, many local government units seem to be struggling when it comes to traffic and transport management. This shows simply that some of those people involved in the endeavor have very little understanding of the relationship between transport and land use or do not understand it at all.
Let’s wish the MMDA all the luck and success in the world.