If the University of San Carlos (USC) was able to foresee way back in 1960 that its downtown campus had limited space to expand into the future, it is a wonder the government did not foresee that Cebu would burst at the seams in just 50 years.
Today, the USC Talamban Campus bears the brunt of the failure of the government to plan ahead of its time and Cebu City Mayor Michael Rama has his hands full in a tentative attempt, at best, to ease the congestion that is now called Banilad-Talamban or Ban-Tal.
A look at history bears out what happened and why things were left to fester over the years. In the late 1950s, Fr. Lawrence Bunzel, SVD, treasurer and acting president of USC, began buying properties in Nasipit for a future engineering campus after it was decided by the SVD administration that technological education was the future for Cebu. Using his personal savings and a modest family inheritance, the first few hectares of the property beside the Ouanos and across the Tudtuds was soon purchased.
Eventually, the property would reach up to 83 hectares as time went by, with more and more purchased either by the USC Corp. or by the Society of the Divine Word (or the SVDs, Societas Verbi Divini), the religious order that owns and manages the university.
Side by side with this early purchase by Father Bunzel was his friend, the visionary founder of Maria Luisa Properties, the late Mary Renner Osmeña. Mary must have sensed that progress was going north as she bought the first 10 hectares of hillyland on the opposite end bordering the huge Ouano properties, which came to be known as Maria Luisa Village. Wife of the late Dr. Emilio V. Osmeña who was beheaded by the Japanese in World War II, Mary opened the subdivision in 1965 at a time when Ban-Tal was nothing but a two-lane dirt road, asphalted in sections.
All was well when both Maria Luisa Village and USC-TC trudged along with life in the 1960s, when there were only a handful of jeepneys going to and from the city in the morning and another in the late afternoon in the “alas-puno” fashion, leaving only when the jeepney was already sprouting people on the roof.
And then other subdivisions followed in short order: St. Niño, Doña Rita, Paradise in the early ‘70s, followed by more and more subdivisions and real estate development in the 1980s. In the early 1990s, Gaisano Country Mall opened on what was once a vineyard of the Borromeos (or was it the Ouanos?). Soon the tiny Foodland Grocery, just outside the road to Maria Luisa folded up, although the name has stuck and young people probably wonder now where this name came from when they see only the Philippine National Bank there, which obviously does not produce food.
A serious attempt to widen the roads occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s during the term of the young Tomas Osmeña, guided by a master plan called the MCLUTS, short for Metro Cebu Land Use and Transportation Study. This was the time when Cebu city had the country’s latest computer-operated traffic system, the same one we still have today!
And then South Road Properties (SRP) ate up all the money and the mayor’s attention, which would have been to continue purchasing more right-of-way properties. Back then, people in Talamban wondered why they had all these four-lane roads complete with sidewalks when very few cars were on that road. Still, many owners refused to sell and so we have these weird four-lane, two-lane roads along Banilad to Nasipit until today, when the prices of real property here are now sky-high.
All attention was focused on the SRP and any attempt at following up on the MCLUTS or even crafting a new one was apparently set aside. Mayor Osmeña came back to city hall in the mid-2000s armed with the idea of copying Bogota’s Bus Rapid Transit or BRT (in English, Rapid Transit Bus). Between that time and now, about six or seven years have passed and all of the major cities of South America have since copied the BRT concept (I personally saw it in operation in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil last year). Meanwhile, we languish without a mass transit system and no transportation master plan.
Ban-Tal is a lesson for all other towns and cities to learn from. Every town and city wants to grow and be economically successful. But there is always a price to pay: the more people you have with secure jobs, the more cars are bought, as a sign of success and because we do not have a functioning rapid mass transport system and road networks that were built and expanded way before the crowd came.
Imagine this: the French and the British built subway tunnels in the late 1800s, way before their Metrorails were even developed or invented. They did this with manual labor and a few coal-fired equipment. And they did this on wet sandy soil beside two great rivers, the Seine in Paris and the Thames in London.
Today they reap the harvest of their forward planning and long-term vision. Hundreds of thousands commute in these subways and underground rails to their work daily.
Meanwhile, we still have to debate what to do with Ban-Tal and all these jeepney and taxi drivers who load and unload whenever and wherever they want.
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