If you’re still waiting for President Noynoy Aquino to allow himself to get run over by a train, be prepared for a long, literal wait. Maybe you’ll have to catch him first after he blows by you in his (borrowed, the palace says) Nissan GT-R, his current ride of choice.
The furor about Aquino not making good on his vow to get crushed under an onrushing train, as he promised nearly three years ago, had not yet died down when it was reported that the traffic situation is only bound to get worse before it gets better. That’s according to the American Chamber of Commerce and Industry, which predicted that Metro Manila could become uninhabitable in just four years, if car sales continue to go up.
AmCham adviser John Forbes said car sales could rise five times on a year-to-year basis over a decade, from a little over 100,000 in 2010 to as much as 500,000 by 2020. And as far as I can tell, this hasn’t rung any alarm bells in the Aquino administration, now on its sixth year of selling the lie that traffic congestion is good because it signifies robust economic growth.
That wonderful observation was last made by Aquino himself nearly two years ago, for those keeping score at home. And just like his promise to throw himself under a train if he doesn’t build the LRT Line 1 extension from Baclaran to Bacoor, that preposterous statement is going to hound Aquino as he prepares to zoom away into the sunset of his administration.
It was in September 2014 that Aquino last made his loony traffic-is-good claim, when he was speaking before the Filipino community in Spain, during a state visit of his. Aquino claimed that worsening traffic is caused by the hiring of 500,000 people in the business process outsourcing sector, who can now afford to buy cars.
“When you come home [to Manila] and you’re caught in traffic, just remember that people are running errands, not just loitering around,” Aquino told the expatriate Filipinos. “That is a sign of economic growth.”
As is usual with Aquino, he only spoke half the truth—the same one that AmCham is telling us now. What Aquino didn’t say is that his government, for all its supposed gains and the huge amounts it allocates to itself in its annual budgets, has not built any significant roads, bridges, flyovers or any other new infrastructure to take in the increased number of vehicles being sold yearly.
Yes, vehicle sales are always rising on an annual basis and yes, this can be interpreted as a sign of economic growth. But these facts inescapably lead to the question of what Aquino and his government have done to accommodate the new vehicles—and the answer, just as inescapable, is nothing.
And if Aquino is not jailed after his term, he won’t be able to just hop into his Godzilla (the GT-R’s nickname) and floor it in a couple of years. He’ll be sitting in traffic like the rest of us victims of his economic growth and his official laziness—even during the Christmas holidays when no one is supposed to be on the road—wondering why he never got to build anything to ease traffic flow when he could have.
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The incompetence of Aquino as far as building new roads and bridges is concerned is matched only by the impotence of the agency in charge of registering vehicles and drivers, the Land Transportation Office.
And you’d think that, because this President is a car buff, he’d at least have an LTO that could actually do its job.
But no. As bad as Joseph Emilio Aguinaldo Abaya has performed as transportation secretary during Aquino’s term, the LTO under this dispensation seems hell-bent on proving it can always do worse.
(Wait a minute. LTO is an attached agency of Abaya’s department, so I guess I can’t really say that LTO did such an execrable job independently of the man handpicked by Aquino himself to lie down on a train track somewhere and die with him.)
I’ve talked to a lot of people and none of them can remember a time when LTO or even its old forerunner, the Land Transportation Commission, bungled its job as badly as it has during Aquino’s term. No one remembers a time when LTO can’t deliver license plates, drivers’ licenses or even the P50 sticker tags on vehicles; and guess what, the corruption that has been the hallmark of that graft-ridden agency hasn’t even been checked, as if to spite Aquino’s so-called policy of straight-path reforms.
Last week, the head of LTO, Alfonso Tan Jr., resigned—in shame, most likely, and not for personal reasons, as Malacañang Palace reported. And even his recently deceased and certainly controversial predecessor, close presidential friend Virginia Torres, it can be argued, did a better job than the unlamented Tan, who did nothing tangible and demonstrably good during his stint as head of that agency.
But at least Tan didn’t promise to kill himself if he failed at LTO. Making such stupid statements, like the one about traffic being good, is apparently the exclusive preserve of Aquino himself.