Manila's traffic problem is a class war
(Herman Tiu Laurel / DieHard III / The Daily Tribune / 09-17-2014 WED)
For a year-and-half the City of Manila's residents and commuters
enjoyed deliverance from decades of horrendous traffic along its
streets. Mayor Joseph E. Estrada had been elected to solve the Manila
constituency's problems and he went at it with hammer and tongs. He
targeted traffic and was quickly faced with a concerted challenge from
provincial and colorum buses plying the narrow streets and avenues of
Manila, which made a depot wherever they chose. This he overcame and
traffic really eased. Not much later the truckers, with Big Business
behind them, and the incompetent national government started their
complaints.
The incompetent national government (particularly the Philippine Ports
Authority and the National Economic Development Authority), the
truckers and the Big Business interests, and foreign chambers of
commerce had over a year to respond to the City of Manila's traffic
alleviation operations but never took the necessary steps to tackle a
problem building up then in Manila's port area. A year and a half
later, we are told that one of the major constraints in the port area
is the accumulation of tens of thousands of unloaded containers that
have taken up the spaces for parking of thousands of loaded container
vans or those to be loaded and dispatched.
PPA general manager Juan Sta. Ana admitted that prior to the build-up
of empty container vans in the port, the City's truck ban was not a
problem. The daytime truck ban caused fewer trucks to egress, from
5,000 to 6,000 down to 3,500 a day. The question for the PPA general
manager is: Why didn't he do something about that then? One possible
solution to that is to ship out those empty containers to Subic or
Batangas ports by barges and other maritime route. It would have cost
a sum but the alternative is what we had--billions of pesos lost to
traffic standstills, and a public backlash--which buck Malacañang,
PPA, NEDA, and Big Business have tried to pass to the truck ban.
Malacañang could have done what the PPA wasn't bright enough to do,
but its brilliant geniuses didn't give a hoot until it became a
national crisis. Mayor Estrada's decisive action on a decades-long
problem of the City of Manila's constituency did solve the traffic
mess, where neglect and failure marked successive national governments
installed by the ruling class of Big Business oligarchs, as well as
corrupt Edsa I and II Yellow political and government bureaucrats.
Ferdinand Marcos had built thousands of kilometers of roads. Cory
Aquino built only the Ortigas flyover in six years but her oligarchs
raked in trillions while corrupt politicians feasted on her
Countryside Development Fund (pork barrel) legacy.
As Cory's oligarchs and Yellow politicians wallowed in the bacchanalia
of profits, little investment went into transport and port
infrastructure.
Today, we have the highest port service rates in the world, according
to former NEDA chief Romulo Neri, who made a presentation on this to
then Palace occupant, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, and this was what led
to Neri's persecution in the NBN-ZTE case, where he was, in fact, sort
of a whistle-blower.
On the other hand, the business interests that lord it over in the
ports also do so in many of the lucrative privatization and
public-private partnership deals--from the quick profits in the
country's transmission grid to new, wasteful casino operations.
The biggest headache of this society--in traffic or other aspects of
the economy--are the oligarchs. The rich, as a social class, simply
wield too much disproportionate power for their interests and against
the general welfare. I saw this problem in 1992 when I thought I had
a viable solution to the traffic problem.
After months of study, and consultation with schools such as Ateneo de
Manila, and after seeking support from other citizens, like former
Quezon City Mayor Charito Planas, I proposed to the Metro Manila
Development Authority that mandatory school bussing for exclusive
school students be instituted to remove up to 200,000 cars from the
roads.
The Ateneo had approved the proposal and we were working on getting
the support of De La Salle and others, but when I discussed it with
the MMDA chair at that time, I was flatly told that "The rich will get
angry with us."
The City of Manila's traffic problem today has, as an underlying
condition, a class war--where the rich and powerful have gotten their
way through a government totally subservient to them and where the
poor do not have any say at all. What Manila's traffic woes have so
far uncovered is a ruling class that neither has any commitment to the
general welfare nor creativity to fashion a solution that can give
everyone a win-win solution. And it is absolutely reflective of how
the entire country has been messed up all these years.
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