Cebu’s traffic: It’s 6 years of ‘Noynoying!’

This week, the media in Cebu celebrates the 22nd Cebu Press Freedom Week… something that the media in Manila does not celebrate. This week’s celebration comes 44 years after the Sept. 21, 1972 declaration of Martial Rule by the conjugal Marcos Dictatorship. Just think… that it’s been 44 years since that dark day in Philippine political history when the entire nation morphed from a working democracy and into one-man rule. Our democratic processes were all thrown out of the window!

During the 2016 Presidential elections… then Pres. Benigno “PNoy” Aquino III repeatedly warned that if Mayor Rodrigo Duterte gets elected into the Presidency… Martial Law will return to the country. Thankfully, the majority of the Filipino electorate didn’t listen to his paranoid warnings and overwhelmingly voted President Duterte to lead the country for the next six years. Now Pres. Duterte has bagged a 91 percent approval rating… the highest of any President ever!

These days… Pres. Duterte has been attacked by the foreign press printing anything he spews from his mouth… including his profanity and making a mountain out of a mole hill simply because the foreign media doesn’t understand his language… foul or not. But why is this happening to Pres. Duterte? Simple! It is due to the fact that despite what has been said that he would do… we still have Free speech, exercised by those who are called “Dutertards” or the “Yellows.” In short… democracy is vibrant today and it is enough reason for the Cebu media to celebrate Press Freedom every year in the last 22 years.

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Last week when the news broke that Cebu City, “The Queen City of the South’ was tagged by Waze (a very popular traffic and navigating app) as the ‘Worst City to drive” in the Philippines taken from 186 cities of the world, I thought that it is very easy to pin the blame on the Duterte Administration which has done nothing so far to ease our traffic congestion. However, let me remind you that the political leadership in Metro Cebu is still very much under the control of the Liberal Party under Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña and Cebu Governor Hilario “JunJun” Davide III only Mandaue City Mayor Luigi Quisumbing and his City Councilors shifted alliances from the LP to the PDP-Laban.

However since Pres. Digong Duterte doesn’t want to look back and pin the blame on his predecessor, then it is our duty as journalists to point out clearly why Metro Cebu is now dubbed the ‘Worst City to drive’ by Waze and it is due to the six years under President Aquino who never gave Cebu any infrastructure development to the point that we called this “Noynoying!” Let me reprint what I wrote last October 28, 2015 in The Freeman about this issue.

“At the LP’s “Gathering of Friends” at the Cebu Coliseum last August 24th when President Aquino was in town to lambast his critics he then lied to us Cebuanos that he plunked in P23 billion for Cebu in the last five years. Well by now, everyone knows that after a meticulous count by Cebu news reporters, we all ended up a little over P2.2 billion in rehabilitation projects in the last five years under the Aquino Regime.

So what does this make of PNoy? Nothing but a big fat liar! Even their much boasted widening of the Mactan Circumferential road, while it is on record that this money was spent… we cannot see this road widening anywhere. So the next logical question is…what happened to that money for the widening of the road? Was it stolen by the LP as what former Cebu Governor Emilio “Lito” Osmeña suggested?”

It is a fact that for the last six years I’ve been asking for at least four flyovers in Mandaue City… one along Plaridel St. leading to the Marcelo Fernan Bridge intersection… then along the intersection of Plaridel St. and M. L. Quezon Ave. leading to the old Mactan Bridge, then two flyovers along the Mandaue Highway at the junction of AS Fortuna Ave. and UN Ave. at the corner of the Pacific Mall. For Cebu City… since I chaired the Cebu City Traffic Operations and Management (CITOM) in the year 2000, I asked the DPWH for a parallel road to Escario St., which at that time wasn’t yet traffic congested. Today it is one of the worst traffic congested streets in Cebu City.

Don’t blame me if I’m blaming the six years of total neglect by the previous Aquino Regime because our recommendation still remains today. While we can still pin the blame on Cebu’s traffic mess on the previous “Noynoying” Regime, the Duterte Administration under DPWH’s Mark Villar is now tasked to solve Cebu traffic mess and they don’t have to look far for solutions as we have already showed them six years ago. Now is the time to move and fund these much needed infra projects to ease Cebu’s traffic.

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