Road link

Among the most horrendous problems confronting the new Cebu City administration of Mayor Edgardo Labella is our unbearable traffic situation. Negotiating thru city streets nowadays takes a proverbial lifetime. We do not anymore measure our trips between two city points in terms of hundred meters or kilometers.

Doing so tends to mislead us. Let us take for example, the distance between my residence and law firm. If anyone asks me how far is office from home, my answer is “oh, it’s 45 minutes away." Twenty years ago, my reply to the same question would be “about four kilometers that would take me 8-10 minutes of leisurely drive to negotiate.” Do we discern the man hour loss?

We rather tend to agree with economists in their assertion that the resulting daily losses caused by traffic jams run to billions of pesos. Their empirical presentation is just too glaring to ignore. This terrible traffic condition is a legacy of the unlamented regime of Tomas Osmena. His almost criminal neglect to open even one meter of a new road in his mayorship of about thirty years should earn him the kind of ire we spewed when he reportedly destroyed the office of the city mayor in the last few days of his rule.

While this problem is gargantuan, it is not without remedy. Social scientists are in unison in their pointing to political will as the solution. The new city mayor has just to resolve to start focusing on this issue. He does not have to adopt a massive infrastructure program and titillate our imagination by announcing the kind of propaganda similar to the president’s “Build! Build! Build!” All that Mayor Labella has to do is to identify where to pour whatever initial resources the city can spare and he should tackle one location with impossible grid lock after another. That should be his tact.

Mayor Labella knows that the Salinas Drive in the Lahug-Apas area is a sight of terrifying daily traffic congestion. From the corner of Gov Cuenco Avenue to where the JY Square stands, the pace of vehicles is incredibly slow. At times, motorists stand still in wasteful minutes. This is apparently caused by the flow of unbelievably big volume of vehicles serving the IT Park coming from the direction of Archbishop Reyes, the Ayala Cebu Business Park, San Jose de la Montana and F Cabahug Street.

This nightmarish traffic at Salinas Drive is not difficult to decipher. There is no other location in the city where more multi rise buildings are constructed side by side than at the IT Park. These structures are, on the average, eighteen stories high. So the population density based on the ground level is exponentially high.

To avoid the pitfalls of technical literature, let us compare the IT Park to an easily perceptible block of Barangay Luz bounded by Arch Reyes Avenue, San Jose de la Montana, Ayala access (Cardinal Rosales Road), and Cabantan Street. That portion of Barangay Luz is home to an estimated twelve thousand residents while about one hundred fifty thousand workers flock to IT Park mostly in cars. Considering the traffic volume, the road leading to IT Park is the area where the mayor should start.

The idea is to find a way to divide the number of vehicles going to or coming from the IT Park using only the Salinas Drive. This is aside from widening that road itself. Mayor Labella, as a first suggestion, should consider widening the Cabantan Street from Mabolo towards Archbishop Reyes Avenue, opening its extension to Gorordo Avenue and then constructing two swing roads to connect to IT Park.

As the second suggestion, Bauhinia Drive in Barangay Kasambagan should also be extended to link Gov Cuenco Avenue and F Cabahug Street to help diffuse the volume of cars taking the San Jose de la Montana. As of now, vehicles coming from Hernan Cortes using F Cabahug consume 30 minutes from where i live to San Jose de la Montana, a stretch of about 600 meters before they literally crawl to Salinas Drive. A drive thru Bauhinia can cut travel time to probably just 5-8 minutes.

If the mayor starts trying to solve this problem before the year ends and finishes it before December 2020, he will have achieved more than we expected.