“In this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.” This is one of Benjamin Franklin's last greatest quotes. But if he was alive today, he’d probably add a third one --traffic. One of the truest certainties in people’s lives all over the world at any time in the last century. Especially in the Philippines, in particular in Cebu and Manila.
The certainty of traffic congestion (or jams, as they are usually called) follows the certainty of population growth and economic growth worldwide. All over the world, the number of people worldwide increased over history, slowed down only by wars and epidemics. And with the introduction of cars and other vehicles, these too followed a certainty of increasing. And thus causing the daily traffic jams.
It’s just so easy to understand the phenomenon. Development is caused by economic growth which in turn, is caused by people producing things and value. To do this, people need to “travel” each day creating “trips” which necessitates the building of roads. Population and economic growth results in rapid increases in “daily trips” needing more vehicles on our roads which eventually reach their carrying capacities causing traffic congestion.
When the population, the economy, and the need for transportation grows, the first solution is to add more vehicles. But the other equally effective solution is to use bigger-capacity vehicles. So, if you need to transport 20 people to work using one jeepney and over time, the number of workers becomes 80, the usual solution is to add three more jeepneys on the road. But an equally good solution is to simply replace the jeepney with one bus which can carry 80 people.
Traditionally, there exists a certain point in time and a city’s transport system performance when vehicle capacity changes are introduced, e.g., as we have written two episodes back --from trisikads to tricycles, to multicabs, jeepneys, mini-buses and buses, and henceforth to BRTs, monorail, LRTs, and MRTs. There is a “usual” natural progression to this, obvious in Manila and elsewhere, but not so clear in Cebu. As we have said, the good management by CITOM in the first decade of the millennium may have caused the delay but the strange introduction of new denominations in the next decade further compounded the issue. Under the umbrella of the “Public Utility Vehicle Modernization Program,” or PUVMP, new denominations were introduced. But the PUVMP was supposedly a program to address environmental and climate change issues, not transportation capacities. As a result, new denominations were introduced which did not follow the usual progression of capacity improvements before. Inevitably, this further speeded up congestion levels and diminished the ability of the government to address the same.
This will continue to fester and degrade. Ultimately, only the introduction of high-capacity mass public transport will address the problem --BRTs, monorail, LRTs and MRTs. But even these were stumped --Manila BRT was cancelled, EDSA “BRT” a.k.a. the “Carousel” is uncertain and Cebu BRT unrecognizable from its original design and practically evolved into not a public mass transport system, but a costly experiment that even our city officials can’t explain. One thing is certain --it will get worse. (To be continued)