Tall concrete pillars are rising one after another in the Diliman campus of the University of the Philippines to serve as the foundation of an elevated monorail, just like the one running around the Disney World amusement park. This monorail will loop around the campus, allowing access from the outside into the university and vice versa through several stations.
UP president Alfredo Pascual grandly sees this monorail project as the university’s “role in nation-building” and its “great privilege to have been part of the realization of a mass transit system conceived by Filipino minds and created by Filipino hands.” More precisely, in the words of Science and Technology Secretary Mario Montejo, the aim is “to install a monorail prototype that will serve as the main thoroughfare within the Diliman, Quezon City campus of UP.”
One indeed wonders what the rationale may be for a “main thoroughfare” via a monorail system inside the Diliman campus, a place where traffic is nonexistent, where there is no lack of transport to get around, where biking and walking are a pleasure. Why the imposition of a permanent infrastructure of a “mass transit system” which is irrelevant and incongruous in a place of academe?
As we look at the route of the monorail on the map of the Diliman campus, we immediately see that the monorail will connect the two major avenues of Katipunan and Commonwealth. The UP-Ayala Technohub Complex is located along Commonwealth (where the UP Arboretum used to be) and along Katipunan (where the old campus of the UP Integrated High School is no more). Ayala is presently constructing another huge commercial complex. It is clear that the strategic connection between these two major commercial complexes is what Secretary Montejo refers to as the “main thoroughfare” passing through and within the Diliman campus.
Another commercial area that will be linked by this monorail is Philcoa (that sorry mess of vehicular and human congestion) and CP Garcia, a street within the campus that has become a highway for the dreadful traffic of massive industrial vehicles like 8-wheelers, 16-wheelers, 20-wheelers, even 24-wheelers, container vans, delivery trucks, cement mixers, that pass through it each and every single day.
It is obvious that this monorail is in the interest of the world of commerce, amusement parks—in short, the marketplace. To impose the impropriety of such an infrastructure would jeopardize the integrity of the world of academe, which is the Diliman campus of the University of the Philippines, an environment embodied by its heritage buildings, expansive green fields and the quiet, quiet splendor of trees.
—ANNA FER,
annafer23@gmail.com