Democratizing transportation

(Part 2)

Last week, we said 80 percent of the people being served by a road are carried over 20 percent of the road space, while 20 percent of the passengers use 80 percent of the road space.  Or something like that.  It’s not also exactly the 80-20 ratio but fairly close to it.  But definitely quite far from the equality that is the cornerstone of what we consider a democratic society.  That’s why the transport sector maybe considered the last bastion of inequality in a society characterized as “governed for the people, by the people, and of the people.”  And not too many people notice.

If you have a car, try driving the entire length of N. Bacalso Ave. from Bulacao up to the downtown-uptown area between 6 and 8 o’clock in the morning.  You’ll see scores of our fellow city dwellers lining up the side of the road waiting for jeepneys to take them to work or school.  Definitely you don’t have a queue there; it’s a free-for-all, survival of the fittest kind of thing, where the old, the women and children, and the physically-challenged are always at a disadvantage.  It is so commonplace; we all seem to simply accept it as normal.

In striving to get a ride ahead of the others, people outwit each other and rush towards oncoming jeepneys, jostling to enter the rear to get a seat, with a few just hanging on at the back, inspite of the rules prohibiting it.  And so in the early mornings, half of the outer lanes of a 4-lane road is always full of waiting passengers, or even the whole lane, since oncoming vehicles certainly could not use half a lane.  And since jeepneys stop every few meters to load/unload passengers, that outer lane actually carries a fourth of its supposed capacity.  That’s how inefficient our present road system is.  We’re complaining of traffic jams.  But in reality, the roads carry only less than 70% of its capacity.  Even on peak hours.  Especially on peak hours since traffic jams slow down traffic even further and decrease the capacity.

Yet the few who own cars, and who still manage to be comfortable in air-conditioned interiors are the first to complain of traffic congestion.  Some quarters have already demanded, correctly in fact, that the road should be shared to everybody – to allocate space for people who walk or ride bicycles.  We hear all sorts of sectorial demands for pedestrian lanes, bicycle lanes, motorcycle lanes, and other lanes we can think of.  Then we add that heavy trucks should be banned or garbage trucks should not pass these ways.  How unfair can we get?  And if we do allocate road space as such, we need at least 8 to 10-lane roads just to give at least a lane to every kind of road user.  How absurd can we get?

When former Bogota mayor Enrique Peñalosa said, “A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars; it’s where the rich use public transportation,” a lot of people cringe at the thought.  But we fail to see that in many of the world’s more progressive cities, this is already a reality.  Tokyo, and the rest of Japan for that matter, is one perfect example where almost everybody uses public transportation to work or school.  In fact, it is often said that in Japan, only the president or the vice-president of a company rides cars in going to work.  And then we rationalize that, yes, that’s possible because they have a very efficient and comfortable public transport system.

But we have LRTs/MRTs in Manila, and soon we’ll have a BRT in Cebu.  Manila is still dysfunctional, and the Cebu BRT is still to be built.  But if we are to look at how BRT’s in those cities which built them ahead changed their urban shape, there is indeed something to look forward to.  It’s a long way to go, to attain equality in transport.  But we’re getting there.