‘Para!’

The Metro Manila Development Authority’s crackdown on colorum (or unauthorized) buses and other public utility vehicles, with steep fines that run up to P1 million, is the latest sign of an urban traffic system strained to an extreme.

For desperate Metro Manila residents, the temptation is to just shout “Para (Stop)!” and get off, only to realize that the entire city has come to a halt, with traffic gridlock everywhere.

Last month at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Science and Technology, one of the plenary speakers was Rene Santiago, an expert on urban transport who has served in the government under four transportation secretaries. His paper was titled “Silver Linings on Metro Manila’s Traffic Miseries” but at the start of the delivery, he explained that he was trying to be optimistic by inserting “silver linings.”

Indeed, Santiago’s paper was not very rosy. Metro Manila, after all, only has 0.2 percent of the Philippines’ land area but 18 percent of its population and 28 percent of the vehicles. A civil engineer by training, Santiago said there is no lack of best practices that we can pick up from other countries but we just don’t seem to be progressing.

At one point he showed a graph depicting Metro Manila’s vehicle loads at different hours of the day. He was ominous in declaring that we don’t seem to have rush or peak hours anymore.

Santiago is right. Where in the world but in Manila do you have guests excusing themselves from an evening party, explaining that they want to beat the traffic and get home.

Beat the traffic at 10 p.m.? They’re referring to the trucks that come out at around that time, armies of trucks coming out of hell (like the hungry ghosts I was describing in last Wednesday’s column).

Throughout the day we have several rush hours, starting in the early morning with people going to work and students being driven to private schools, one or two per vehicle (often in vans), then the trucks interspersed during the day, then the early-evening rush when people head home. I’ve actually sat in traffic at midnight, on Ortigas, one of the places where trucks pass.

Dream plan

Santiago named all the kinds of traffic plans we’ve had, and some of the good practices that came out of those plans but have since been abandoned. Mmetroplan of 1975 brought us LRT1, and bus ways on Magsaysay Boulevard.  Then there was Mmutstrapp in 1984 and Mmutis in 1998, schemes which seem to be forgettable.

His “silver lining in Metro Manila’s traffic miseries” was a Transport Roadmap for the Greater Capital Region, a “dream plan,” according to him, to build 137 kilometers of new roads, 78 km of urban expressways, and 200 km of rail transit lines.

We’ve seen new flyovers, a few kilometers of rail transits, but it does not seem likely we will banish traffic jams by 2030, which is the ambitious goal of that Transport Roadmap.

It all goes back to the piecemeal solutions we have, some of which seem to create more problems—for example, those U-turn schemes that, Santiago says, “invite unsafety.” I hear that the U-turn slots on Katipunan Road will be taken out soon, and traffic lights returned.

Those flyovers, too, aren’t steps forward. Each flyover relieves congestion only for a few months, then become new nightmares of congestion because we leave the root causes of traffic unsolved: just too many private vehicles, too little of efficient public systems.

There were measures that could have worked but were phased out, like synchronized traffic lights.

Or the bus ways. All over the world we see bus rail transit (BRT) systems working beautifully, where the buses become like trains, lined up to take in passengers who pay their fare even before getting seats.

We can use that system as well for jeepneys. There are just far more buses and jeepneys than we need (and far more bus and jeepney drivers than there are these public vehicles). So what we have is wild competition among the drivers for passengers, kamikaze (suicide) buses on Edsa, jeepneys converting roads into waiting terminals (a way as well to block other jeepneys). Integrating buses and jeepneys into “rail” systems would assure each vehicle of getting its share of passengers, in an orderly way.

The obstacles are often political. Especially with elections coming up in 2016, politicians cannot afford to alienate potential voters like jeepney owners, drivers and their families. Santiago said there are at least 120,000 households depending on jeepneys; that’s a lot of votes. Jeepney drivers are a stubborn and individualistic lot, resistant to any kind of reform. So we live with the jeepneys, which Santiago described as a 70-year-old technology that has seen no innovation.

Then there are the tricycles, now left to local government units to regulate—and again, politicians are not about to do that, given the large number of votes they can get from tricycle drivers and their families.

As for the buses, we’ve seen how the MMDA is almost helpless, introducing one scheme after another, only to give up as bus operators protest, or refuse to cooperate. The number of deaths from kamikaze bus drivers continues to mount, but public outrage is short-lived. How many people remember the bus that drove off the Skyway, killing dozens of people? Erring bus companies are suspended, sometimes even have their licenses revoked, only to come back under another name.

Then there are the owners of private vehicles, all sacred cows. Santiago cited Singapore several times for best practices, like the imposition of fees on vehicles that want to enter the central district during rush hours. Steep fees force people to take public transport which, in Singapore, is clean, rapid, and efficient.

Outside Manila

I have to say that some of the transport infrastructure plans outside Metro Manila are at least moving. North and south of Manila we’ve seen new expressways cutting down travel time. I hear a trip to Baguio can now be made in less than five hours.

At the same time, I do fear that the urban areas outside Manila might be headed for catastrophic situations. I already see flyovers and expressways in Cebu and Davao and don’t consider them signs of progress.

Cebu, Davao and other urban areas should learn from Manila and say “para!” early enough.

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E-mail: mtan@inquirer.com.ph