Costs of bad management

Last Saturday, I found myself observing the flow of traffic at a key intersection in Ortigas Center from atop a nearby 42-story building. Traffic from one particular direction was inordinately clogged compared to the flows from the other directions. And yet traffic volume from the other directions was no less heavy than that coming from the badly congested side. Traffic enforcers at the intersection—who had apparently decided to override the automatic traffic lights and were manually controlling traffic instead—were simply not giving enough “go” time to this particular side of the crossing. It’s as if they were unduly “biased” in favor of the traffic coming from the other directions.

Two things crossed my mind as I observed all this. One, how often have we seen it happen that when traffic enforcers decide to take things into their own hands and override the traffic lights, traffic flow invariably seems to get worse? That seemed to be happening again in this particular instance. Two, I wondered how much smoother traffic flows would be if traffic enforcers on the ground had the benefit of being guided through wireless communication by colleagues with an aerial overview of traffic flows, thereby seeing where the bottlenecks are. The latter can be provided by CCTV cameras, helicopter-borne traffic monitors, or even traffic officers deployed atop tall buildings in high-traffic areas, just as I was last Saturday.

How I wished then that I had a way of telling the enforcers below what they were doing wrong, as it was all so clear from my vantage point. In the end, sheer mismanagement had caused a traffic jam that seemed completely avoidable. How many times have we found ourselves getting stuck in a traffic backup and seeing, upon passing the bottleneck, that better management (say, of undisciplined bus drivers hogging lanes at a bus stop) could have prevented it all? I wish our Metro Manila traffic office would employ more proactive ways of coordinating traffic management on the ground, like having them informed and guided in real time by traffic monitors with a bird’s eye view.

Domestic air travel gives me yet another reason to rant about bad management. Have you noticed how delays have become the norm rather than the exception for domestic flights across the country, with delays worsening as the day draws on and as delays pile atop one another? Notice how planes now often have to circle the Ninoy Aquino International Airport before being able to land because of air traffic congestion? And haven’t you been annoyed at how, despite the presence of passenger tubes at Naia Terminal 3, arriving Cebu Pacific passengers are still made to exit the tube a few meters into it, take the stairs down, walk outdoors or take a bus to the terminal building, enter it at ground level, then go upstairs again? What bothers me about this is not that I feel inconvenienced myself (thank God I’m still fit), but seeing many physically challenged fellow passengers, including elderly and handicapped ones, subjected to this needless punishment.

I had presumed this to be part of the airline’s way of cutting costs on terminal usage fees, allowing it to offer the savings to customers through lower fares. But then I began to question how much cost saving this really entailed, and whether it was all worth it. Upon inquiry, however, I was told that the problem (also?) lay in the way Terminal 3 has both international and domestic sections. And when an arriving plane docks at a tube on the international section, passengers must go out again so they can enter the building at the domestic arrivals side. Still, I find it incredible that a management solution could not be found for this. Surely, there must be more creative minds at the Manila International Airport Authority to address this issue.

As for delayed flights and circling planes, a knowledgeable source traces these to a weak airport management system, including obsolete hardware and software. We do not employ state-of-the-art systems that will permit rational scheduling of domestic flights flying in and out of Naia to avoid bunching of flight arrivals, for example. The old Hong Kong Kai Tak International Airport operated in the 1990s with just one runway, with far heavier airline traffic than Naia has today. And yet it had none of the problems that we have now. It’s all a matter of airport management, I’m told, and is a key element in why the Philippines remains in Category 2 status with the US Federal Aviation Administration. This means that the country does not meet minimum world air safety standards set by the International Civil Aviation Organization, a status we’ve had since 2008. This in turn impairs both our national carriers’ ability to fly to other countries, and our ability to attract more flights, and hence more tourists into the country, “more fun” notwithstanding.

And then there’s the ongoing power crisis in Mindanao. Again, this primarily traces to utter mismanagement over the years. Mindanao stakeholders like to blame the Electric Power Industry Reform Act (Epira), a very good law on close scrutiny; to my mind, bad management of its implementation is to blame. President Aquino’s message in last Friday’s Mindanao Power Summit was simple, if frustrating, to his Mindanao audience: There is no free lunch. To be sure, much pencil pushing still needs to be done to assess full costs and benefits of various solutions offered. But in the end, it would be best to let Mindanaoans manage their energy themselves. After all, no one has a bigger stake in managing it well than those who must directly suffer the costs of bad management.

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