Roads

It’s a classic case of how to do everything wrong.

That’s the stretch of Tandang Sora between Capitol Hills Drive and Commonwealth Avenue. If you’ve been driving from UP to Commonwealth through that road in past months, you’ll know how horrible the traffic there is. If you’ve been driving there over the last couple of weeks, the pit of the Christmas season, you’ll know that Christmas-y thoughts are the not the things that will fill your head while stranded there.

Last year, things were pretty light and breezy there. You’d have a bit of traffic every now and then, particularly during rush hour, but nothing that wears you down to a frazzle. Things flowed more or less easily, notwithstanding that jeepneys, as is their wont, stopped everywhere, or roosted in the most inconvenient spots. And notwithstanding that motorcycles sprouted everywhere, materializing at your side in a flow like a flash flood.

Then they put up a traffic light at the intersection of Tandang Sora and Commonwealth. And everything sucked.

Even on Sundays, particularly this past month, traffic is a nightmare. A long queue would form before Commonwealth all the way to Capitol Hills Drive. Those trying to avoid it would turn to a neighboring road, which, since everyone would be thinking the same thing, would soon fill up too and turn into another huge parking lot. To ease things, or prevent the usual madmen from making things worse by usurping opposite lanes, cops would be strewn in the area to manage traffic.

Yet when you come to think about it, the matter is really simple.

What is the problem?

The problem is the traffic light. When it turns red, the vehicle on Tandang Sora that is about to cross Commonwealth stops. When it stops, all the vehicles behind it stop as well, triggering the effects described above. Before you know it, the sheer accumulation of stewing vehicles turns into a nasty tangle. All that comes from that one vehicle that has stopped before the red light.

There’s no immediate relief for that one vehicle either once the light turns green. Soon as it crosses Commonwealth, it turns smack into another red light and waits for another minute-and-a-half while the other side of Tandang Sora across Commonwealth unloads its contents. Then it waits for another half minute for those turning left. On a bad day, it could take more than half an hour just to get through that short stretch of road.

The system is a classic example of bureaucratic thinking, a vastly elaborate way to do things with catastrophic results. It’s like the joke about how many lawyers, or engineers, or government officials it takes to change a light bulb. The answers range from five to 20 depending on the profession. When in fact you need only one.

What is the solution?

U-turns. Specifically, removing that intersection and creating U-turns on Commonwealth Avenue to the right of Tandang Sora on opposite ends.

There’s a side story here, which is that that stretch of road has been long due for widening. The rest of Tandang Sora going all the way to Katipunan has already been so. Only that stretch remains untouched, courtesy of “informal settlers,” also known as squatters, that have resisted demolition. That’s one place, along with the one beside Trinoma, that has seen clashes between demolition crews attended by cops and recalcitrant dwellers. Government will need a lot of resolve to resolve that impasse, preferably armed with a relocation plan instead of arms. But I mention this because I’ve heard residents express the hope, or belief, or conviction that once the road gets widened, traffic will get better.

But why wait at all? I’ve always said that U-turns were not a one-size-fits-all idea, and Bayani Fernando, who had more grit than imagination, was wrong to insist on it at quite literally every turn. It works in some places, it doesn’t in others. It works at the intersection of West Avenue and Edsa, it doesn’t at the intersection of Quezon Avenue and Edsa. It should work for the intersection of Tandang Sora and Commonwealth.

For much the same reason it did in West Avenue. That intersection used to be a nightmare too before they removed the traffic light and created a U-turn instead. The same logic applies to Tandang Sora-Commonwealth. You remove the traffic light there and you won’t have the one vehicle that’s come to a halt in front of it, you won’t have the convoy of vehicles stalled behind, you won’t have the dozen or so cops trying to discipline drivers (those on motorcycles particularly), you won’t have millions of pesos lost in fuel, you won’t have Arabic-type curses hurled at the world if not indeed alarming demonstrations of road rage.

What you will have is traffic flowing, as all the vehicles coming from Tandang Sora turn right into Commonwealth like a river tumbling into the sea. Needless to say, you can’t have jeepneys stopping to pick up and/or unload passengers to replace the one that used to block everyone’s path.

It’s our capacity to be so resolutely opposed to common sense that’s making our lives miserable. You see that demonstrated every day on the streets. In drivers swerving left to get past the long queue ahead of them and succeeding only in making everyone, including themselves, pay for their stupidity. In bus and jeepney stops located before and not after intersections, such as the one again in Commonwealth before Tandang Sora (going in the direction of Fairview), posing a threat to all the vehicles turning right. In intersections with traffic lights where U-turns ought to be, and with U-turns where traffic lights ought to be.

“Use your coconut,” we like to say. It’s good advice in more ways than one. We start doing that, and we can truly greet each other “Happy New Year!”

Every day.