What a rush!

CEBU, Philippines - For those who grew up in the era when sports entertainment wrestling was still believed to be real, those three words were the last thing opponents wanted to hear.  Everyone knew that when you heard those words blasting out of the arena speakers, the meanest tag team wrestlers, the Road Warriors, were on their way to wreak havoc.  What’s that got to do with motoring?  Let’s just say that, sans the intro music, every time I see public works vehicles come rambling along, I know they’re out to wreak havoc on our streets.  Never have I ever come across a work site by the public works department that made me smile. 

First of all, they never put up warning signs at proper distances to forewarn motorists of possible inconvenience up ahead.  More often than not, these caution and warning signs are, at most, five feet away from the repair site.  If they actually place warning signs two to three blocks away from the actual repair site, most motorists would be given a chance to take alternate routes instead of having to jockey over a single lane coming from a multi-lane road.  Sadly, that is not the case.  And we all get stuck having to “share” the road with every single motorist caught flat-footed by their total lack of common sense.

Second, whoever is in-charge of material procurement for such road repairs must be terribly lousy at mathematics.  How often have you had ten workers at one worksite having to take turn with one pick axe, one shovel, one set of gloves and one reflector vest?  I don’t know if they employed too many people, or someone decided to pocket most of the budget and only bought one instead of ten sets of equipment.  Whichever one it is, all we know is that these public works employees are busy standing around doing nothing productive.

Speaking of nothing productive, destroying and repairing good roads are practically what they’re doing.  I’ve driven these roads many times before and they are a lot smoother than the many other roads in the city.  I’ve seen roads that make rough seas look like polished glass.  I guess this is because our government is busy pretending again.  According to one of the heads of the cities, these road repairs are in preparation for our province’s hosting of the Asia-Pacific summit in two years’ time.  I seem to recall a certain international, cultural structure that was also being rushed in preparation for the same summit a few years ago.  It’s now a derelict and practically useless.  Well, it was actually useless to begin with.  It looked so big on the outside but tiny and useless on the inside.  The way that place was built, it’s only useful as a parking lot or a good place to hold go kart races.

Lastly, all these road repairs make us appreciate the small stretches of good roads that we have left.  After being stuck for forty-five minutes in traffic on three hundred meters of slow-crawling traffic due to the closure of multiple lanes, it is so good to be able to zoom past sixty kilometres per hour for a good five minutes before you’re stuck again in another forty-five minute traffic jam.  Oh, the feeling is such a rush!  Short rush, but a rush nonetheless.

But if I were to solve these bad roads problem, I would cover the potholes with all these useless, high-end electronic “air” tablets that were given to people who couldn’t figure out the difference between angry and flappy avians.  At least those gadgets will be put to good use and really serve the public. [email protected]