‘Progress should be measured
not by how many have cars
but by how many opt to go
public and not use their cars.’
FILIPINO time” is a concept that many of us seem to accept as a given, as acceptable. For many of us, arriving late for a meeting, or a meet-up, or whatever reason is seen as reasonable, give or take maybe 15 to a max of 30 minutes.
So many excuses abound, traffic being the most often used. If there were to be a Family Feud contest on the Top 10 excuses for being tardy, I am almost certain “Traffic” would be the No. 1 answer.
Maybe “Distracted by Queen of Tears” would be within the top 10 these days, taking the place of “Crash Landing on You” held about two or so years ago! (No spoilers please, I am just in episode 3).
My friends from way back can attest that when I was much younger, arriving late (sometimes not even arriving at all) was so me. Then I started working and came face-to-face with how, as a professional, being late was almost never acceptable because so many other things, and so many others, depended on you being on time — on time to arrive, on time to accomplish the items on your “to do” list, on time to respond to queries or to make them yourself. Being late could mean defaulting on rights, or losing once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, though on those rare occasions, it could also mean the difference between luck and bad luck — like if you arrived late and missed the last seat on a trip that led to tragedy. But again, these last examples were and are a rarity; more often than not, say nine times out of 10, being late or tardy could only be bad for the one who is.
The same goes for the status of urban planning in the Philippines which strikes me as not only “15 or 30 minutes late” compared to the best in class, but hours and hours late if you compress decades into hours and years into seconds. So much so that around the country we are playing “catch up,” doing things today that we should have done one or two decades (if not more) ago. And you know that delay is more costly not only in terms of money but also in terms of opportunity and time.
I was left with this impression again over the weekend when I found myself caught in the traffic of Davao City, on a Friday and a Saturday. The vehicular congestion matches what we have in EDSA.
The coastal road that allows a motorist to bypass a lot of the traffic areas west of the city center was both welcome and amazing, and it is yet to be completed. Better access from the Sta. Cruz area all the way to Panabo, but just like many bypass roads in and around Metro Manila (and the Laguna Lake towns of Rosal and Laguna, for example), it has come late.
What Davao and even Cebu need to do and do now is to implement much more efficient forms of public transport that would facilitate travel from point A to Z without the need to use private vehicles. This could mean elevated MRTs not within the city centers but fanning out from the city to the suburbs and beyond. And the idea would be this: even the well-off will realize that riding public will be a far more logical decision than driving yourself or paying someone to drive you to and fro.
Progress should be measured not by how many have cars but by how many opt to go public and not use their cars.
Building bypass roads and widening existing ones is a stop-gap measure, but is not a good long-term solution since you can only widen roads to a certain extent and since private vehicle ownership outpaces the government’s ability to build more roads.
But then again, building more roads is not the answer. The problem is we are running late way beyond the “acceptable” 15 to 30 minutes in taking the steps necessary to get more people moving around more efficiently, every day.