Traffic joker

When we were looking for a house to buy in the city a couple of years back, I and my wife found this beautiful place surrounded by greenery and offering fresh air with a good view. The only setback to buying that property was the traffic congestion along its route. So we didn’t buy it. I just can’t imagine spending over an hour snarled in traffic every day on weekdays.

Yet we in Cebu are still in a much better state compared to most commuters in Metro Manila. There, people endure hours-long traffic (four hours on average) and the long lines in humid mass transport terminals just to get to their place of work every day.

Presidential spokesman Salvador Panelo’s definition of a transport crisis offers no consolation to the riding public. He said there is no transport crisis because there is no “paralysis” on the roads. Amid adverse public reaction to that statement, Panelo then took the “public commute challenge” made by militants.

Friday last week, Panelo left home in New Manila at 5:15 a.m., rode the jeepney, a motorcycle and did whatever “creative” way he could get himself into. He arrived in Malacañang nearly four hours later, thankfully in one piece.

I now know why President Duterte likes Sal Panelo; the man has guts and eccentric character, shown not just in his choice of wardrobe, but also in that “public commute challenge” where he at one point spunkily engaged in a tit-for-tat with activists in one of his jeepney rides.

Now with that “public commute challenge” over, I hope we can all go back to the real business of finding both immediate and long-term solutions to the traffic crisis in Metro Manila and in Metro Cebu.

It’s clear by now that this government overpromised and underdelivered on the issue of traffic in Metro Manila. The president attempted to pin the blame on Congress, particularly on one legislator, Senator Grace Poe. She’s allegedly giving the Duterte government a hard time in its request for emergency powers. But the blame game didn’t work because Senator Poe is no political lightweight herself and is more than capable of asking the right questions.

Poe, chairperson of the Senate public services committee, has exposed the government’s lack of a clear and well-studied master plan. In fact, that lack of a clear plan was the reason why the emergency powers bill she previously filed in the 17th Congress lost steam at the plenary.

Apparently just like in the drug war, the Duterte government also wants a carte blanche approach in dealing with the traffic crisis. Well, even the wide political leeway that this administration is having in the war against drugs has merely peeled through the skin of the drug trade but failed to stop it at its core.

The solution to our urban traffic woes lies in the well-studied and scientific approach to the problem. How do we make the middle class eager to use their cars less and use public transport more? How can we make public transport more attractive and user-friendly? Can cycling be incorporated into our metro’s transportation system? None of the answers to those questions are clear to us right now.

This administration’s political capital may be far from exhausted, but its political slip is showing in the manner it is dealing with the traffic crisis. People are beginning to see the hollow reality behind Transportation Secretary Arthur Tugade’s bravado. That’s probably why Secretary Panelo has to provide some comic relief.