Metro Manila as gates of hell

The other week, P-Noy and Supreme Court Chief Justice Sereno led the groundbreaking ceremonies for a new SC building in the Bonifacio Global City. They must have realized that the justices cannot work in the congestion and chaos of its current Padre Faura address. A recent INC demonstration paralyzed traffic in the area shutting down offices for days.

Moving out of Manila is a good idea but they did not carry it out far enough. BGC will soon be as crowded and chaotic as Padre Faura, if not more so. The afternoon rush hour traffic on 5th Avenue and 32nd street is already unbearable.

What the government needs to do is to have a coherent plan to move out not just from Manila but from Metro Manila. They are going to spend good money, P1.2 billion, on a new building for the SC, might as well build it far away from the metro area, possibly in Clark.

The justices need to have a quiet environment away from the hustle of the metro area. They need a place where they can think as calmly and as dispassionately on the cases they are deciding. Being harassed by traffic jams and noisy demonstrators all the time puts undue pressure on justices.

A Justice Square in Clark where we can have the SC, the Appeals Court and the Court of Tax Appeals among others would be a good start to shifting government offices out of crowded Metro Manila. Indeed, even the Justice Department and the PNP HQ can be moved to Clark.

An observation was made in one of my e-groups that “Metro Manila is concentrated on a narrow neck of land between Manila Bay, the foothills of the Sierra Madre, and Laguna Lake. It looks like a neck being throttled. Evidently, population expansion should lie outside this neck.”

Former Press Secretary Buddy Gomez, now a resident of San Antonio, Texas, recently visited Manila and was appalled at the extremely crowded conditions we now have. “I had to cut short my last visit... being a taxi-rider, I was stranded several times...

“Pasig and then Fort Boni/Bayani....the congestion has worsened to a trauma! Taxi queue for at least one hour for a two-hour ride over a 10 kilometer stretch!!! I simply could not handle the traffic. I never thought I’d miss San Antonio this much. But being a Quiapo-born / Sampaloc-bred Waray-waray, I am also an inveterate masochist…”

Buddy then wrote a blog for abs-cbnnews.com where he pointed out the numbers that we and our leaders should see to realize that our Metro Manila is fast becoming unlivable, if it is not already.

“The ‘Distinguished and Ever Loyal City’ of Manila now possesses the startling record of being the No. 1 city in the world with the highest population density! This is on the basis of people per square kilometer. Hooray! Manila is Number One!

“In fact, of the world’s tightest 30 cities, of planet earth’s first thirty cities with the highest population density, 8 are in Metro Manila. They include Pateros and Caloocan being number 2 and number 3, respectively; Malabon and Pasig are number 16 and 17; while Pasay, San Juan and Makati are designated at position numbers 24, 25 and 30. And if this still does not jar your sanity, sense and equanimity, to the world’s 30 tightest, India contributes only 6 cities. Mabuhay! We beat India!”

Buddy goes on to cite more numbers:

“To highlight this demographic anomaly, here is a perspective offering for you to mull over. The national average density for the entire Philippines is 334 persons per square kilometer while Manila’s No. 1 status is bolstered by the presence of, fasten your seatbelts, 42,857 persons!

“Manila’s area is almost 30 sq. km. (My hometown of Calbayog in Samar, with an area of 900 sq. kms.+ has a population density of 181.”

The failure of our officials to do something about “Metro Manila’s sad and presently irretrievable misfortune” should be a big election issue but it won’t be. Sadly, as Buddy pointed out, “the threat of numbers and utter unconcern for genuine people’s dismay were never accorded logical attention much less imbued with a sense of urgency.”

The most that the last MMDA chairman did was to complain when novelist Dan Brown described Metro Manila as the “Gates of Hell.” Laughable indeed! As Buddy observed, “we have been at the ‘gates of hell’ and for so long now, it has been staring us in the face.

“Relevant public policy has been in an immobilized stupor and trance…  Yet, absolutely nothing has been done to address the ultimate cause. All these talk and blabbering, all the walk and strutting go around interminably in circles dwelling on whatever is politically visible, concentrating on the effects: vehicular congestion, flooding, informal settlements, infrastructure enhancement.

“Indeed, all that we have seen are band-aid-brained! Why the fear to publicly address and admit what that principal cause staring us, 24/7, really is? It is the population, stupid!

“What lighting from the gods of nature must first strike our leaders for them to finally wake up and accept that the ultimate solution to Metro Manila is decongestion and population dispersal. Only then when all else will fall into areas and levels of manageability. Without decongestion and population dispersal/redistribution, Metro Manila is beyond salvation.”

Rufo Colayco, a former head of BCDA agrees that we need to decongest Metro Manila. “It’s literally a no-brainer that Metro Manila has become unfixable. The only solution is to decongest it by creating other urban centers.”

But Rufo thinks moving the government center to Clark may prove to be a distraction. He wants to move employment opportunities away from Metro Manila as the more effective way of decongesting it.

“There aren’t employment opportunities elsewhere than Manila. For decades, Metro Manila has sucked the lion’s share of the budget, thus starving the rest of the nation of development funds. That has resulted in a vicious spiral -- as people have crowded into Metro Manila looking for jobs (and becoming squatters), the escalating congestion calls for even more infrastructure spending. . . and the vicious cycle goes on and on.

“Lately, there’s talk of building subways, skyways, an airport in Sangley and massive land reclamation around it. That will easily run up to a trillion pesos, and will only exacerbate the already excessive population density.

“By spending a fraction of that, we could have a new metropolis along the SCTEx corridor. If planned and administered properly, it should provide a venue by which our businesses would be much better able to compete with other economies. It would provide a much better quality of life, especially to the working classes.

“The deep-water port at Subic, coupled by the SCTEx with Clark, would provide an efficient multi-modal logistics hub that is in tune with current international trade movements.

“Region 3 is ripe for this role. It is sufficiently urbanized, such that competent supervisory and professional persons would readily move there if offered a new job there. And come to think of it, that would potentially reduce Metro Manila’s population and make it less of a hell-hole than it has become at present.

“BCDA proposed such a scheme to Gloria Arroyo in 2003, but I guess she was beset with other urgent concerns at the time.

“The key to jump-starting the emergence of a new center is to bring employment generating investments there. In concrete terms, create affordable industrial venues in the Clark sub-zone in partnership with entities who had done it before in China, Singapore, Taiwan, etc.

“Create a major tourism center on the Zambales coastline where it joins the hills of Tarlac and Pangasinan.

“Stop SBMA and CDC from farting around, filling up what ought to be sea and airports to be tourism and what-have-you centers. Get the Subic-Clark intermodal logistics complex going by partnering with the Singapore Port Authority and/or the Dubai entity that has successfully made Dubai into THE hub for Asia-Europe travel.

“I get breathless thinking of the explosive growth development that could result from an intelligent approach driven and coordinated by government.”

Obviously, we cannot accomplish all these things in one presidential term. But the work must be started. Rufo tried it during GMA’s term and got nowhere. I doubt if P-Noy even thought of it.

The thing is, we may just wake up one day to find out it is too late to do anything at all. In the meantime, our quality of life suffers and a serious drag on economic growth arising from these problems happens.

We have enough competent city planners. Indeed they have planned cities abroad. It is time to harness them to develop an alternative to Metro Manila.

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco.