With the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meetings wrapping up for now in Metro Cebu, residen ts can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that somehow traffic flow will return to its usual pace. It’s a less than ideal flow but still a measure better than the cordoned routes that greatly inconvenienced commuters for more than two weeks.
Car owners were happy. All of a sudden, it took half an hour or a little more to get around if one’s vehicle just followed the APEC ceremonial route, free of jeepneys and trucks along John Paul II Avenue leading to the North Reclamation Area to the Marco Polo Plaza up on Salinas Drive.
For the car-less majority who take public transportation, the rerouting and disappearance of jeepneys (with little or no public notice) and closure of certain roads peeved ordinary residents, shifting traffic from uptown to downtown streets of Cebu City.
They didn’t holler, but truck and delivery van operators had to absorb the extra cost of fielding their lumbering vehicles and paying overtime to implement a truck ban that kept them out of key routes of Mandaue and Cebu City till 10 p.m.
One valuable insight from the three-week disruption was the discovery of how smooth and almost pleasant it was to drive through John Paul II Avenue and Salinas Drive with less competition on the road.
For advocates of the removal of JP II’s center island and Fire Trees, doesn’t this point to the obvious solution to traffic congestion there – basic traffic management.
We tried it awhile. Can we refine the scheme and explore a better way?
Control the way motorists use the road, and regulate who gets access. Focus on that and see faster results.
An infrastructure band-aid, like City Hall’s proposal to hack away concrete lane dividers and uprooting the only patch of green in the middle of a dusty, engine exhaust-filled road, is a permanent loss.
For this brief road emergency exercise alone, we can thank the APEC Forum for a eureka moment. Traffic was the concrete experience of APEC for thousands of urban Cebuanos who saw a change in their daily routine.
The long-term gains of APEC were harder to gauge for ordinary residents whose understanding of the almost 100 closed-door discussions in plush hotels relied on sanitized, highly conceptual, briefing statements issued by organizers about “financial integration”, “inclusive growth”, and other economic mysteries.
The jargon, without action words to say exactly what parties would “do”, as against “talk more about”, made the all-important economic and trade discussions seem far removed from the daily struggle of poverty and urbanization in Cebu.