Hong Kong mountains years back, Cebu present
If we ask our high city government officials to retrieve a picture of Hong Kong taken after sunset from the sea some 40 years ago and compare it with a photograph of the present Cebu City shot also in the early evening hours from a part of Mactan Channel farthest from our port, they might see that the silhouettes of both cities, dotted by electrical lights piercing the darkening skies, are strikingly similar. Of course they should take note of the years such images were taken. It is important for them to realize this time difference because a great part of our mountains that serve as the back drop of our city is not yet as fully inhabited as the hills of modern Hong Kong.
I devoted my last two columns in imagining what were the things needed to be attended to by our officials to prepare our city for the next generation. I said in my last article that this is still planning our city in the context of renovating an existing edifice not building a new structure over a raw piece of land. While I talked about the needed road networks for the city and the kind of infrastructure to prevent flood waters, let me call the attention of our high officials to prepare the mountain sides of the city for their conversions into eventual residential areas. That is the only way we can habituate future thousands Cebuanos.
Today in going to the mountain barangays which command a good view of the city, there are but very few accessible roads. The narrowness of these roads repel future residents in the mountains. There is this urgent need to access our mountain sides with wider, better paved avenues. In the north, the roads beyond Talamban leading to Budlaan, Guba and Mabini are very narrow. Two vehicles coming from opposite directions have to slow down upon approaching each other because a less careful way can produce vehicular accidents caused not by less skillful drivers but more from the narrow lanes. This scenario is not different in the south. As in fact it is worse there.
Our high city officials need to roll their sleeves to attend to this requirement of accessibility in order that the next generation of Cebuanos will not find it very difficult to reside in the mountain areas. The initial phase of this tremendous work will be the expansion and widening of the present roads. Many of the city residents do not know that it is difficult to go to the mountains with a kind of avenues that we have today. A width of ten meters is not ideal for heavy volume of vehicular traffic. Indeed some have been recently concreted and others asphalted but there are still stretches that have remained to be macadam.
While the widening of existing roads to the mountains will have to be worked on feverishly, let our officials ask their planners to designate strategic areas where to build the commencement points of these new highways leading to the mountains. Environmental issues have to be considered in doing their plans.
It will be understandable that the huge expense needed to approximate this ambition will daunt our less imaginative officials. The estimates I am sure will discourage them. But they have to realize that they cannot delay in approximating this concept. The need is urgent not for the present day Cebuanos but for our children. Forty years is a short period of time. The forty years that was Hong Kong with sparsely populated mountain sides is in our hands. Considering that the growth of population is exponential, it contracts the time. The consequence is we have a shorter period of time to prepare and get our mountains ready for residents than the forty years Hong Kong had.
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