Before the Green Loop experiment last Sunday, I already warned my good friend Rudy Alix of the Movement for a Livable Cebu (MLC) that it was bound to fail. And while our talk was not as comprehensive as I would have wanted (we had all kinds of topics over lunch), I did manage to tell him that for one, the heat on these roads, given our tropical climate, was an important factor to consider for pedestrians.
I also told him the success of the noble project would ultimately rest on driving behavior and discipline.
I could only watch with deep admiration these Don Quixotes who proposed the Green Loop project. Noble as it was, it was also a cart-before-the-horse solution. In other words, there are many more prerequisites before such a project was expected to succeed.
At the same time, however, I understood the in-your-face advocacy that the project wanted to project–-which was quite a success: that pedestrian welfare should be part of the planning of any road, highway or street.
What prerequisites will make this project a success? I can immediately think of three expensive and long-term requirements.
The topmost requirement is addressing driving behavior and discipline, a result of the cultural problem of Filipinos being unable to delay gratification and of claiming public space as private. Time and again I have written in this column about this problem, determined by a group of social scientists from the Ateneo de Manila University way back in the late 1980s: Filipinos cannot delay gratification and when they occupy public space, they think they own it.
That is why if you ask Pinoys to form long lines, ostensibly some will make shortcuts. Translated to the street, without a traffic enforcer or a traffic lighting system, our city streets would turn into utter chaos. Last Sunday, every Tom, Dick and Harry of a driver wanted to get out of the loop as quickly as possible, no matter if they broke a few laws to reach their own personal, private goal, thus causing traffic jams.
At the same time, people park their cars everywhere on the streets especially at night thinking that they own the space just because their house is in front of it. This behavior runs across class lines.
Just look at how discourteous some drivers of expensive cars are at Ayala Center or SM City Cebu, never caring if their car is properly parked. Or, closer to home, at the subdivision where I live which turns into an obstacle course as we reach the village clubhouse because four cars are parked on the street opposite each other. And this is supposed to be a neighborhood of highly educated and wealthy people!
It will take a whole generation steeped in the very strictest of traffic laws to remold this kind of mentality; which is like pining for the moon as one can see with jeepney drivers protesting all kinds of fees intended to discipline them and make them more courteous of other drivers on the road.
Another long term requirement is the provision of a public mass transit system, including subway railway lines since putting up trains in the city is a sheer impossibility now. It will probably mean the end of taxis and jeepneys jostling for space but it will also mean more options for pedestrians without going through the harrowing experience of discourteous jeepney and taxi drivers. Again, this is pining for the moon.
A third one is not just the widening of roads but rather also the widening of sidewalks as wide as those on Orchard Road in Singapore (if one can have his cake and eat it too). In fact, the sidewalks there are far wider than Orchard Road itself.
Corollary to this is the burying of electric lines, the planting of shade trees on sidewalks and the provision of bike lanes.
Without all these, any attempt to share the road will always cause more headaches than solutions. Still, Sunday’s exercise in futility was not that futile. The MLC has brought to everyone’s attention the need to address others who do not own cars yet also need the city’s streets.
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I would like to thank Fr. Ruel Lero, acting president of Holy Name University, the HNU administration, Gov. Edgar Chatto and Bishop Leonard Medroso, for the successful Tagbilaran launch of our book “Pagsulay: Churches of Bohol Before and After the Earthquake of 2013.” Thanks also to Island City Mall for hosting the event which was held at the ICM Activity Center last Monday, 29 September. For those in Bohol who may want to buy copies of the book, kindly drop by Holy Name University Bookstore at its Dampas Campus (Tel. 411 3631 loc. 111).