A teaching from the Minglanilla "carmaggedon"
Experience is a good teacher, but it should not end there. For it to be beneficial to ordinary minds like mine, let us add the following declaration: "Putting the teaching we learn from experience to action completes the education". I hope the author forgives me for this impertinence.
During World War II, military strategists learned from two experiences. The first came when the supposed German blitzkrieg in the Russian front ground to a halt after the road network leading to Moscow was covered by impenetrable snow. The Nazi war machine bogged down and was eventually pushed back to where it started. The other experience involved Dwight Eisenhower, the commander in chief of all allied forces. For him to move men and mechanized forces from Normandy and bring the war to Berlin, he saw the need for good roads. Hitler lost the war and had no chance to apply the teaching from his bitter experience but when Eisenhower became US President he caused the construction of the interstate highways.
Just recently, there was a humongous traffic jam from Minglanilla town to several kilometers both northward and southward. Vehicular traffic literally stopped for hours. A report I heard but could not validate said it lasted for six hours. In a conversation I had with a friend caught in the gridlock, he claims to have never experienced a more traumatic traffic jam.
It is possible to imagine the late vice governor Gregorio Sanchez of Cebu Province experienced delays in visiting his constituencies. I knew he preferred to travel to outlying areas and feel the condition of his supporters over enjoying the comfort of his air-conditioned office. There were probably many times when congested well-paved roads or streets littered with holes made him late for appointments. Learning from such experiences, he tried to apply his solution and envisioned a plan, perhaps patterned from Eisenhower's interstate highways to a miniscule level called the Trans-axial highway.
I recall his vision was a multi-lane highway from Bogo City in the north to Oslob in the south. Roughly that is a distance of about 230 kilometers. In his plan, the highway was to be built in middle of the province with exits to the centers of population of both coasts.
Since the Trans-axial highway had the US interstate as its perceived model, the speed allowed to motorists would be around 80 kilometers per hour with slowdowns required near the exits. We could calculate the travel time between Cebu City and Oslob to be just a little over one hour. Today, the time needed to negotiate these two places using the existing roads takes no less than three and a half hours.
Without being mean, I hope some of our leaders experienced the recent Minglanilla "carmaggedon". If they sat in their cars for hours and only reached their destinations after exhausting their patience, they would have experienced something they would not want to repeat. That experience would be a good teacher. What they learn should push them to realize that the late vice governor's Trans-axial concept is an undertaking whose time has come.
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