A surprise which is not

Traffic again worsened a few weeks ago.  While people specifically ranted about the two Mactan bridges, the general situation was metro-wide actually.  The former will always be highlighted because traffic there is more specific trips. 

Even in Cebu City, the average overall travel time increased remarkably in the last five years.  It's not surprising.  What is, is when people say they're surprised!  Why would we be surprised with something so predictable and expected? Even the onset of saturation can be easily estimated.

Almost always, people become complacent when solutions worked. I think it was in early April when a new technology was introduced which reduced the downtime of the old bridge to just nine hours at night.  People started saying traffic on the bridges is fine, except for the morning and evening peaks.  Of course!  The reduction from 24 hours to nine hours actually meant you reintroduced 15 hours of 50 percent capacity on the first bridge, or 17 percent capacity of the whole inter-island system, or 33 percent of the Mandaue to Lapu-Lapu traffic.

But why the sudden constriction again?  What happened?  Is it because traffic grew?  "No way it can grow that fast," a friend exclaimed.  Well it's not fast, actually it just grew normally.  It's when you're at the upper end of your capacity when congestion catch up with you – fast.

Let's do the numbers. What's the total number of vehicles passing through the bridges eachday?  100,000?  50,000? 30,000?  Let's just say 50,000, though I believe that's on the low side.  What's the growth rate of the vehicle registration?  Let's say five percent, but again, that's on the low side.  That's seven new additional cars passing through the bridges EACH DAY!

We're only talking of five percent growth rate.  But last January, the newspapers were ablaze with a 26 percent increase in car sales for 2015. And I remember last year, the figure was higher for the growth rate in 2014.  Don't tell me this is only in Manila, my email is full of  these car promo sales a few months ago, and society was agog over the impressive economic growth this meant.  True enough, the first quarter posted a 6.9 percent increase in GDP figures. Ask any economist about the elasticity of GDP growth and car sales, especially coupled with remarkably low inflation and interest rates.  The five-percent figure is a pittance!

And do we really think people who bought cars will keep them in their garages?  They'll drive them, of course, all the way to the resorts in Mactan, or vice versa.  Every day, more and more cars are piling up on these two bridges.  And we get "surprised" when traffic becomes bad again?  And we undertake all sorts of "experiments" to try to loosen it up a little.  Schemes in terms of enforcement, education, or redirection may certainly help (or they may not, that's why they call them experiments).  At the end of the day, we go back to capacity and demand.

It's nice to talk of the 3 Es: engineering, enforcement, education. They all help but in varying degrees, the "varying" grossly lopsided on the side of engineering.  Enforcement and education may improve traffic conditions a little bit.  But the bottom line is engineering.  Or, as traffic expert Rene Santiago will exclaim, "How do you expect to improve traffic when you have not increased a single square meter of capacity in the road space?"  Calling some lanes as "Christmas" lanes, or something like that, won't improve traffic in Manila.

To seriously address congestion, we look into demand (has to be measured), capacity (measured as well), and efficiency (of the transport systems).  The latter requires an analysis of the "measured" demand over the "measured" capacity.  These usually refer to long-term solutions, but are applicable to short-term ones as well.  Well, they can continue on experimenting, but sooner or later, they'll have to come to terms with transport science.