A drastic proposal to ease traffic

Last Monday, the final installment of the 21.49 million school children (excluding senior high school and higher education students) began their deluge into campuses nationwide. And thanks to climate change, that wasn’t the only deluge we needed to contend with — which, needless to say, created a toxic combination that made traffic as unbearable as a Vice Ganda concert.

A three-hour trip down EDSA seemed common fare for most, while some reported being stranded up to five hours due to flooding. As usual, all of our authorities acted surprised, as if we had been hit by an unpredictable snowstorm. The MMDA even claimed that some residents in Manila worsened the flooding caused by heavy rain in Metro Manila Thursday by deliberately clogging inlets in major thoroughfares.

Every year it is the same old story. And you can blame climate change, residents, students and Dan Brown all you like, but the one indisputable fact that remains is that there are too many of us living in a given space. Period. Now, unless we draw straws to see who should move out, the simplest way to deal with traffic is to start charging for it. Seriously.

Now, I know that what I am about to propose is not going to sit well with everyone — but you know what they say about drastic times, right? So bear with me.

Double the gas prices

I told you that it wouldn’t sit well. But before you make your way over to my office to re enact the famous Casino Royale torture scene, give me a minute or two to explain. Gas maybe more expensive than beer these days, which makes it cheaper to drink than drive, but honestly, the only time I see a genuine improvement in travel times around Manila is when gas prices soar.

Let’s not forget that driving a private vehicle is a privilege, not a right, so why not place a premium on it in congested areas? Think about it, if gas was priced at P80-P100 a liter in Metro Manila or other high density areas, but your travel time was reduced by half, wouldn’t you already be ahead? Not only would you have most likely halved your fuel consumption, giving you immediate ROI, you would have saved time in the process.

It’s no different to the North Expressway example. When they first came out with their P200 plus toll to go from Manila to Clark, there was almost anarchy. But now, I can’t think of anyone who would swap that for the two to three hour painfully slow crawl that used to happen before. Most of us end up actually saving around P200 in fuel anyway because of the state of the roads and the reduced traffic, and that is not even counting the time, stress and danger that you avoid.

Now that we have reduced the volume on the road and cut down on senseless trips, now comes the tricky part. The second part of my plan would be to use the extra P50 or so a liter to go back into road repairs and rehabilitation of the public transportation system.

At today’s estimates, there’s no reason why they cannot raise an extra four to five hundred million pesos a day. The government could use some of that money to take over all the city bus franchises, which would allow them to control how many are out at any given time, and reduce the congestion even further.

Plus with the added taxes that we pay per liter for our private vehicles, it could subsidize the fares to the point where it would be senseless for the average worker to even think about taking a motorcycle to work.

In theory, simply by making the cost more prohibitive, we could reduce the amount of vehicles on the road, which in Metro Manila alone, costs the Philippine government $3 billion annually in lost productivity, illness, wasted fuel and vehicle maintenance.

Basically, the road user’s tax gained from our fuel would only be putting a premium on the private user (which is no different to charging toll for a better road) and should encourage them to make more environmentally friendly and socially responsible driving decisions — which, in a way, is like buying back our time.

If w are disciplined enough to plan our trips sensibly without having to do this, then great. But we’re not. The saddest part is if we don’t do something as drastic as this, fuel will inevitably rise again and we would be paying P70 to P80 a liter anyway without any of these benefits.

Just a thought.

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Feel free to share your own thoughts, suggestions and solutions with the author on twitter @jdeakin72