Traffic woes, again
Let me share with the young generation the origin of the phrase "like a broken record (mura'g gubang plaka in Cebuano)." This idiomatic expression came from an old technology called turntable. Records of songs were implanted on vinyl that we called locally as plaka. The plaka, either the long play or the 45, was a circular disc that we played on turntables. When a record had a scratch, the needle, after some spins, would slide back to the scratched portion and the song would also go back to an earlier part such that it would be repeated. The glitz was called by disk jockeys as "regroove". We then had the situation when the song kept being repeated. Society adopted it and anybody who would keep repeating what he had already said was talking "like a broken record."
This article sounds like a broken record. It has got to be. In a number of times, spread along several years of my writing, I hammered on the idea of a smooth vehicular traffic in our city. When I started writing about our traffic, it was not as bad as it is. The flow of our city traffic was still tolerable. We could negotiate from one end of our city to the other in 15 minutes. And with the passage of time, travel time got lengthened. It began to stressful to commuters and riders.
As I am about to sound like a broken record, we need to acknowledge certain indubitable facts. Everybody knows that today, we have just too many vehicles for our road to handle. The volume of transportation units running on our streets has increased exponentially within a generation.
This phenomenon is understandable. Let me give an example. Less than 30 years ago, there was no Sitio Panagdait in our barangay called Kasambagan. Sugar and corn were alternately planted in that area and when the weather was not unfavorable for crop planting, it was simply cogonal. Today, Panagdait is a large subdivision teeming with people, many of whom use private cars to go to work or attend to business. Considering that this sitio has over a thousand registered voters, we can easily extrapolate the number of its residents.
About three decades ago also, Maria Luisa Estate Park in Barangay Banilad, was the enclave of only a few of our rich and super rich brethren. There were vacant spaces between beautiful mansions. At present, this rich subdivision has expanded in size and multiplied its residents, and it appears to us outsiders that every residential space has been taken and occupied. We probably do not argue if we state that dwellers used to have an average of two cars then, whereas today, there are about seven or eight or 10 cars in each of their garages.
It is sad to admit that our government has not matched the increase in the volume of vehicles with a corresponding lengthening and widening of our road networks. When I mentioned these facts to a friend of mine (I call him Sir Wendell Sevilleno), he quickly pointed to a realistic solution to an obvious traffic anomaly. To him, it is impossible to achieve efficient traffic condition, which should mean no gridlocks, when there is not space for other motor vehicles. Since our government does not have the resources to keep building new roads to accommodate the influx of new vehicles, why does not government resort to measures to reduce the number of units on the road?
That has been my point since many years ago. I replied to Sir Wendell that it is one remedy for Congress to pass a statute discouraging people from using old cars. Limit the car ownership of the rich families to reasonable levels. Another measure is to disallow the importation of vehicles that are considered junks in other states. Why do we buy multicabs when these units are no longer allowed to run in the countries where they are manufactured? Third, when we reduce the number of small units of public transportation, we have to upgrade our bus system by using double-decker buses.
Congress can invoke police power to address what is now happening as a dreaded problem.
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