COMMENTARY
The result of the internet based road user survey conducted by Waze which showed that Cebu is the worst city to drive in around the entire world has brought mixed reactions from Cebuano motorists.
As a true blue Cebuano, I am unhappy with the result too but I would not go into the point of arguing to prove it wrong because the facts that would prove it right don’t need a survey in order to be validated.
If we have to be academic about the result, there are several points that we can raise to argue its validity in relation to sampling, methods, statistical treatment and a lot of other things in relation to the conduct of a scientific survey.
Whether the survey is scientifically credible, the fact is that traffic is increasingly getting worse every day in Metro Cebu, and this reality should be taken into consideration rather than making an issue about the validity of the survey.
There are Cebuanos who still live in their own reality and believe that Cebu is better off than Manila in terms of urban congestion. Despite the lack of infrastructure to absorb unprecedented development in Metro Cebu, many continue to believe that ours is a city better off than the rest of the country.
In retrospection some 15 years ago, whenever I was sent by this paper to the southern towns of Cebu for a coverage, I would usually experience traffic only up to somewhere in Tabunok in Talisay City and the rest of the journey is smooth, but nowadays traffic is stretched up to Carcar City.
Except in the South Road Properties (SRP) and the North Reclamation Area (NRA), there is no other street here in Metro Cebu that you can run up to 80 kilometers per hour because of the worsening traffic congestion in our city.
I don’t want to sound like a prophet of doom, but wait until these entire high rise condominiums in uptown Cebu City will be operational. I don’t know if it is still viable to live in Cebu because of the monstrous traffic that it will bring.
Like everyone who navigates the city streets on a daily basis, we know how congested traffic is in Cebu and we have not seen infrastructures being built or roads being widened.
But inadequate infrastructure cannot be solely blamed, since there are other contributory factors to congestion.
Some of the many contributory factors are the blatant disregard of traffic rules, undisciplined drivers, inefficient traffic managers, increasing number of vehicles, lack of parking spaces in commercial buildings and the lack of parking areas for many privately owned vehicles that are left overnight on the side of the road.
People would naturally blame the government for this chaos and conveniently forget that we also contribute to the degrading livability in Metro Cebu by disregarding traffic rules to serve our own interest.
We don’t need a survey to tell us that we are heading into the quagmire of immovability and the danger of the contaminants it brings because we are living with it every day and little by little we are being poisoned by the realities we are facing.
As a dutiful Cebuano, let us stop the whining and the whimper and start instituting measures that could surely solve the problem. For starters, practicing something that would not cost anything to you and the government, namely discipline.