Opening of access road inside Capitol to be postponed

CEBU, Philippines - The opening of the diversion route inside the Capitol compound on Monday will not push through, announced the Cebu City Traffic Operations Management.

CITOM operations chief Joy Tumulak said the concerned parties, including the provincial government, the Department of Public Works and Highways, CITOM, and the contractor of the concreting project, will still convene on Tuesday for the finality of the scheme to be implemented.

DPWH requested the provincial government to have the Gov. M. Roxas Street or the access road inside the Capitol compound to be opened for vehicles bound for M. Velez Street from Escario St. and Osmeña Boulevard.

This is to pave way for the concreting project as well as the curing of the newly concreted pavement along N.G. Escario Street to M. Velez Bridge.

The schedule of the concreting project will be known on Tuesday and the project is expected to be finished within 21 days.

The public announcement, which showed the scheme of traffic and the schedule of the opening of the temporary route in Capitol compound mounted along the stretch of Osmeña Boulevard, has already been removed.

Provincial Administrator Mark Tolentino, in a separate interview, said he was wondering why the advisories were mounted in the first place when there was no coordination meeting yet.

Tolentino said CITOM has not yet given feedback if it would deploy personnel to man the traffic in the area.

“At the end of the day, everybody agrees nga gamiton ang road. Wa tay poblema ana. But di pa na puede. They haven’t decided to deploy traffic enforcers… We still have to go over a lot of things before we can open the road. Let us move it back for maybe one more week until everything is cleared.  Because if we run it on Monday, definitely magkagubot,” Tolentino said.

“There must have been miscommunication somewhere,” he added.

Under the conditions, the access road will be one-way and loading and unloading of passengers inside the Capitol compound are not allowed.

Vehicles are also not allowed to blow horns and should maintain a 15 kph speed limit while inside the area. — Michael Vencynth H. Braga and Jean Marvette A. Demecillo/ATO (FREEMAN)