‘The better-planned metropolitan areas are planned not around how to move motor vehicles faster from point A to Z; they’re planned around how to move people first: how to get them faster from point A to Z.’
IF only public transport in the Philippines were as efficient as it is here, why would I need to bring my car?”
So commented my colleague Karl Ocampo as we sat inside one of Hong Kong’s many double-decker buses yesterday. We arrived in Hong Kong to attend last night’s awards ceremonies for FinanceAsia, during which Nickel Asia was cited as one of the best-managed companies in the Philippines in the basic materials category.
Efficient indeed, as any traveler to Hong Kong easily discovers. From the time one arrives at the sprawling Chek Lap Kok international airport on Lantau Island, a traveler need not worry about how to get into the city proper because limousines, Uber, taxis and buses are available – and, of course, there’s the AirPort Express that “jets” you into town and then connects you to the ten metro lines (called MTR) that crisscross the special administrative region.
Yes, ten MRT lines. In contrast, I distinctly remember that the first time I visited the then Crown Colony of Hong Kong in the mid-1980s, there was just the Tsuen Wan line that connected the Kowloon peninsula to Central, Admiralty, Wanchai and Causeway Bay on Hong Kong Island.
Note that the land area of Hong Kong is about 1,100 square kilometers, housing 7.5 million residents; in contrast, Metro Manila has an area of 630 square kilometers, housing 13 million residents. In the eyes of Karl, it is very clear that Hong Kong does a much better job of moving people.
I’ve always said as much.
One of our biggest mistakes in urban planning, in my book, is that we do not think of how to move people first and foremost; we think of how to move traffic. And so we come up with all sorts of plans, from building skyways (late in the game) to enforcing number coding on already clogged roads that we have made even narrower by carving out bike lanes for the very few who dare ride bikes along our main thoroughfares. These plans benefit people with cars but do not solve the problem, because the problem is how to get people from point A to Z as fast as possible and that’s not to encourage them to buy and drive their own cars. It’s to encourage them to take the most efficient means of transport, which should be public transport, while leaving their cars at home – or in the showrooms.
We seemed to know how to do things right before, when the LRT line was first built along Taft Ave. But it took years for that to be followed up by a second and third and fourth lines; not only that, our different lines use different gauges of rail tracks and different cars, which is so inefficient and impractical. And I’ve always wondered – why did they not think of connecting the LRT to the international airport when they first built the LRT, when its terminus in Baclaran was already so close?
It thus becomes inevitable: a Filipino travels abroad for the first time and finds himself in a city in our region – Bangkok, Singapore, Hong Kong, or Kuala Lumpur. And the reaction?
Something no different from Karl’s: “If only…” or “why can’t…”.
The better-planned metropolitan areas are planned not around how to move motor vehicles faster from point A to Z; they’re planned around how to move people first: how to get them faster from point A to Z.
Move people first, and you won’t need as many vehicles on the road as we have today.
