‘Traffic Republic’

EVERYBODY NOWADAYS has something to say about the traffic situation in the metropolis. I can’t remember the time—it seems like ages ago—when traffic was not a national issue that it has now become. These days everything that we do must go with the flow of traffic, adjust to the stops and go’s, or should we say the momentary go’s in between semipermanent stops in normal everyday traffic conditions?

These days, traffic practically rules our lives and how we do things depends on our ability to cope. It stands in the way of even “the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men,” to borrow from Robert Burns. The poet could have written a lifetime’s work of epic poetry on the subject of traffic had he lived in our time, becoming like us, the constant unwilling detention prisoners of the giant trap that we have laid down for ourselves in the streets with our grossly anomalous and inefficacious mass transport system, the progenitor of what now ranks as the fifth worst traffic problem in the whole world.

The infamous quote from a high-ranking government official that traffic is not fatal is highly disputable, but everyone must agree hands down that the statement is stupid. There is documented evidence that exposure to everyday traffic gridlocks places the person, whether driving or commuting, to extremely stressful anxiety levels. Multiply this by at least twice a day—to and from work—five days a week, 20 days a month, and the frightening probability of mortal diseases developing from dealing with stress, at alarming lengths and frequencies, becomes too serious to be taken for granted.

Those who have experienced sitting through long hours of waiting in agony inside a stationary vehicle under the hot sun or during a vicious thunderstorm (while worrying to death over tasks and appointments that shouldn’t be missed, or having to ignore in the meantime bodily aches like a full bladder or a bowel movement seemingly ready to explode) and those who push themselves to the limits of their physical and emotional endurance to survive their inhuman condition—they will eventually pay the price for this cruelty in terms of shortened lives or, sooner or later, with their own sanity.

A traffic gridlock traps the physical body in as much as it imprisons the mind into a state of idleness, which we all know to be the workshop of the devil. And with this situation in place, it becomes only a matter of time before a sense of loathing one’s self sets in: Why, one may ask, do I let myself suffer this cruel indignity? The longer the feeling of loathing lasts, the more likely it ferments into something more dark and dangerous, a deep-seated hatred, for instance, toward the life that we have and, more appropriately, the government that we allow to run this country when very clearly it has nothing to offer.

When the government brags about some vague accomplishments in the areas of the economy and good governance, and equates the specter of traffic gridlocks with signs of progress, that government is actually insulting us. There should be no sugarcoating the fact that incompetent people are being appointed to powerful and critical positions in the bureaucracy because what they lack in terms of qualifications, they managed to offset with well-placed political connections. A lawyer, for instance, is on top of the traffic management job that highly-trained technocrats might otherwise be more equipped to handle. And despite clear signs of government’s traffic management strategies being woefully ineffective, we haven’t seen heads roll or incompetent people being fired despite growing public clamor beginning with the man supposedly on top of the situation.

Try imagining, while you are stranded in traffic, the public officials who live way more comfortable lives than you do, and still getting paid their fat salaries whether or not they are actually doing their jobs. Those idle hours waiting for traffic to move stimulate the imagination to entertain all kinds of thoughts, from wishing you were a superhero who can fly and go where you please to that of becoming a revolutionary who can liberate this country from an incompetent and insensitive government.

Sometimes, when your butt aches like hell from sitting idly through motionless traffic, wouldn’t it be sweet to just barge into Malacañang and kick butts there?

A revolution is not always borne of man’s desire for monumental change; sometimes, it is driven by the simplest needs that couldn’t find fulfillment. So much for ideology or for wanting to change the world; Filipinos have simple dreams; and a transport system that works, one that does not subject the poor commuters to everyday indignities like the situation that we always see now, is certainly not too much to ask for.

Adel Abillar is a private law practitioner with a small office in Quezon City where, he says, “I alternate between being boss and messenger.” He obtained his law and pre-law degrees from Manuel L. Quezon University and the University of Santo Tomas, respectively.