You drive down a four-lane asphalted street. On both sides, taxicabs and trucks are parked just after you enter it around half past nine in the morning. The morning rush is over, and yet you notice that traffic is slowing down.
There used to be just one eatery here about two years back. Now there are more than a handful, and you realize they are the reason for the slow down: the four-lane road has now become just two lanes as the outer lanes are used for parking.
As you wonder whether it is your taxes that were used to widen the road and build those two additional lanes only to be used as private parking for these 15 or more taxicabs and trucks, your attention is immediately caught by another taxi about to cut your path from the opposite lane, despite a long, unbroken yellow line right at the center of this road.
Up ahead, you notice a few construction workers hammering at the side road. There is one backhoe shoveling a section of the outer lane, moving soil to a waiting dump truck. There is another one on the opposite side up ahead. Traffic has slowed on your side while it has completely stopped on the opposite, a queue of cars now forming, their drivers waiting patiently.
Then you remember this is a road-concreting project that started over two years ago, when there was another president sitting in Malacañang. Now someone with an iron fist sits there. You mutter to yourself that once you reach your destination, you will check with the Guinness Book of World Records to find out whether this project will qualify to be in the next round of awards.
As you go through the road, you notice deep gouges on the side, apparently a drainage project is also going on simultaneous with this road-concreting project. You ask yourself whether this is allowed but you are no engineer. So you make it a point to ask someone you know as soon as possible.
As you trudge your way into this three- or four-kilometer stretch, you slow down here and there because tricycles suddenly block your way and do as they please. You remember that two years back, way before the local elections, it was announced that tricycles would be phased out on this road and that a training program was in the works to help drivers that would be displaced as a result.
Even as you imagine what really happened since that news broke out, you are jolted back to reality again as motorcycles suddenly whiz by, on both sides of your car, literally inches from scratching the paint. One of the drivers wears no helmet.
The other has one, but there are two more riders on his back and they are bare of any helmet. You notice they are speeding fast, snaking through cars. More motorcycles whiz by, unmindful that they are encroaching on the opposite lane.
Then you see plastic bottles and wrappers thrown here and there on the side of the road. No one seems to care that the surroundings are so dusty and dirty.
On this very short stretch of a road that has now taken the best of about 30 minutes of your time to negotiate from end to end, you wonder how the sitting president fares.
This is, after all, just one small stretch of a road and yet, writ large, you can immediately see all the problems that confront the nation: plenty of illegal parking, two delayed infrastructure projects; taxi drivers who make illegal U-turns; tricycles on a national highway with no program to phase them out with as little impact as possible on their lives; overspeeding motorcycles that do not care where they pass through, their drivers or passengers not wearing helmets. On top of this all is garbage and the sheer inability of barangay officials to impose cleanliness among their constituents.
And so you ask yourself, is this the country you want your children to live in? You voted for a president who promised change. But change is coming too slowly. Will it ever come?
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