'Commondeath' Avenue

We are a metropolis in a state of denial … denial that our streets are mean and vicious. They are generally treeless, lightless, unsafe at any speed, shoddily made and billboard-blighted sewers of traffic. Every so often, as what happened to UP Professor Chit Simbulan, they kill. After a few weeks of mourning, we will start to forget the loss and eventually our streets will resume their maiming and murderous ways.

If there was a most wanted list of criminals for streets, then Commonwealth Avenue would be the Philippines’ No. 1. It should be renamed Commondeath Avenue. I will not recite any statistics in this article for they are the refuge of those who will not do anything to address the problem. The past week has seen many who spout percentages of change in accidents and deaths as though one or two less deaths from dozens a year is cause to celebrate.

The Origins Of Commonwealth

Allan Jacob’s Boulevard Book provides models for Commonwealth Avenue to follow.

Commonwealth Avenue was not originally meant to be the ultra-wide accident capital of the Philippines. In 1941 when it was first conceived, it was meant to link the elliptical site of the planned commonwealth capitol complex with the University of the Philippines. It was to stretch northeast to connect to the Philippine Military Academy, which was to be transferred from Baguio to a plateau in Novaliches, now the site of the Batasang Pambansa.

In the postwar revisions of the plan to create a new capital in Quezon City, Commonwealth Avenue was intended to link the elliptical (which was made into a memorial for President Manuel Quezon) with the new capitol site in Novaliches. The PMA stayed in Baguio.

The prewar avenue was designed to be a parkway, a type of multi-lane boulevard that had service lanes on both sides to cater to local traffic and a central freeway for higher speed through traffic. Just like the plans for EDSA in the 1950s, Commonwealth Avenue was not supposed to be accessible directly by strip malls, stores, or even private driveways.

No-Hope Avenue

I have seen the 1950s detail drawings for the avenue in the archives of the DPWH. They showed the access/service lanes plus generous tree planting at regular intervals on the sidewalks, access islands, and central islands of the avenue. These plans for a fully detailed avenue (actually a boulevard) that segregated pedestrians, and also slow and fast traffic, were never fulfilled.

We lost any hope for the local slow-access lanes in the ’80s and ’90s. This is the same period when the DPWH (and eventually the MMDA) started its widening madness, cutting down mature trees and opening up wider and wider expanses of concrete in the misguided notion that this would solve our traffic woes.

As other countries with more progressive officials and concerned citizens have found out, more and wider streets just means more traffic. Widening streets is attacking the symptom and not the cause of traffic. Such programs reduce the safety of both pedestrians and commuters, more so in the context of uneducated drivers and the Filipino cultural quirk where traffic laws, lanes, signals, and signs are mere suggestions and everything is subject to negotiation.

The 1970s saw Commonwealth Avenue extend and widen to allow more people to reach the booming bedroom subdivisions in “Farview” and beyond. By the ’90s, these sprawled communities had reached almost full densities. These led to the mushrooming of malls and all manner of commuter-oriented facilities. Yet no redesign of the avenue was prepared or built to allow for pedestrian overpasses, bus stops or intermodal terminals.

A Wealth Of Old, Unsolved Problems

This deficiency in our road planning and design was highlighted as early as 1939 in a speech by Vice President Sergio Osmeña. The VP noted that traffic on Manila’s streets was caused by the lack of lay-bys and proper bus stops or terminals that were off the road right of way. He instructed the Bureau of Public Works to look into that problem.

World War II prevented any action on that instruction and since then, our DPWH and municipal governments have been designing and building roads without any accommodation for stops, transitions or the needs of pedestrians (beyond amazingly narrow sidewalks).

All our avenues before the war like Taft were tree-lined parkways.

Note how today this deficiency creates immense traffic bottlenecks at crossroads where public conveyances have to drop and pick up passengers. The assumption of today’s government engineers is that the only users of roads are cars and vehicles that do not need to stop except for a red signal. Pedestrians are hardly considered a factor in road design. Sidewalks don’t seem to be in their vocabulary and if they are, they are hardly ever built proportionately to the width of the streets or avenues. (Besides, they are immediately colonized by vendors or utility poles.)

A Dozen Correctives

There have been suggestions to help solve the problems of ultra-wide roads like EDSA and Commonwealth Avenue. There is no one solution and all of the ones enumerated below need to be implemented. Otherwise accidents will continue to happen and deaths will be even more common:

1. Change the boundary system to a fixed-salary system for drivers. This will eliminate the seemingly (and suspected) drug-fuelled frenzy of drivers racing between stops and fighting for passengers. There ought to be a law. This is a no-brainer for our municipal and national legislators. Unfortunately, many of them have no brain … or the intestinal fortitude to counter the powerful bus and transport operator’s lobby. Is Claire Dela Fuente really that powerful? Does she have everyone by their spheroids?

2. Educate public and private drivers on the meaning of those darn white and yellow lines on the road — they are not just suggestions or decorations.

3. Actually paint and maintain those lines on the road. Include with these proper signs, signals, and all the urban elements all proper avenues should have (but which disappear, are stolen or otherwise deteriorate to nothingness here in the Philippines).

4. Light up Commonwealth Avenue and all its crossings well. Most stretches are dark as hell, which is where all those bus drivers appear to have come from … and where everyone would like to send the bus operators and public officials who connive with them to put the public in harm’s way daily, all in the name of greed.

5. Build lay-bys, proper stops, and terminals with adequate space for vehicles and especially people! Do not use the road space for any of these as … duh, traffic will build up, of course.

6. At least a dozen more pedestrian bridges should be built immediately. The cost of all these is roughly equivalent to that one underpass that congressmen built for themselves to avoid the red light at the corner from Commonwealth leading to the Batasan. The overpasses could cost less, as a study by students of the College of Architecture at UP has shown that DPWH’s pedestrian bridges are badly designed and overpriced (so what’s new?).

7. Disallow all businesses, malls, markets, parking, car-repair shops and private lots to be accessed directly from Commonwealth Avenue.

8. The number of licenses issued by the LTFRB should be coordinated with the actual capacity of our roads to carry these vehicles without compromising traffic and our sanity. The LTFRB seems to issue licenses based on how strong the bus lobbies are and the common perception is that there is corruption involved and they don’t coordinate with anyone else (who does in government, anyway?).

9. Part of the funds generated by the LTFRB should go to the building of all the facilities needed above and also to the consolidation of real estate along avenues and roads for proper urban design spaces and elements.

10. Remove those darn U-turns and build proper exchanges or bring back traffic signals. The improvements from U-turns are mostly an illusion. Vehicles move constantly, but the additional distance traveled erases any gains. Those U-turns work only in low-volume traffic anyway. How many have been killed by those temporary-permanent barriers?

11. Move to completely (or mostly) rail-based transit or BRT (bus rapid transit) systems for stretches like EDSA and Commonwealth. Note that in rail systems in progressive countries, you wait only a few minutes for the next train. Here, the wait is as much as 15-20 minutes. Our rail systems are not running anywhere near their actual capacities.

12. Enforce speed limits. Require speed recorders for public vehicles that can be routinely or randomly checked at bus stops. A related setup would be a deafening alarm that is set off when a public bus driver goes over the limit or switches too many lanes. The alarm is hardwired to the driver’s ears and causes excruciating pain at every transgression.

Boulevardization, Urban Design & Planning

Wide roads are a paradigm that countries like the United States are rethinking from its core concept. A new movement called boulevardization is seeking to rebuild these wide avenues of death into multi-lane boulevards that accommodate fast and slow traffic, mitigate accidents, provide tree shade and greenery, and allow for a metropolis to expand humanely.

Paris boulevards built in the 19th century still function well today.

I had written about this around 10 years ago when I attended a conference where the keynote speaker was urbanist Allan Jacobs. He, among a number of academics and theorists, has studied older avenues in old but functional cities like Paris, Madrid, and Barcelona. Some of these are almost as wide as Commonwealth, but they all differ because they don’t cause deaths. On the contrary, these boulevards act to weave their host metropolises together instead of tearing them viciously apart.

Roads, avenues, traffic, and transport are only parts of the whole metropolitan complex. The more sustainable solution to urban symptoms like death and tragedy on our roads is proper urban design and city planning. These two related but otherwise distinct endeavors differ in scale but both are bigger in scope than just the proper design of avenues and boulevards.

As I’ve written often, the problems of Quezon City or any individual city in Metro Manila cannot be solved within these cities alone. Everything is connected to each other. The push and pull of forces in our dysfunctional metropolis create so much friction that accidents and tragedy will inevitably happen.

The death of Chit Simbulan is a tragedy. The greater tragedy would be if we do not remake our city streets, redesign our urban districts, and shift our focus from cars to people. We must move from transport to actual transformation, from a metropolis of madness to one that nurtures our common weal, our common health and our common sanity.

***

Feedback is welcome. Please e-mail the writer at mailto:paulo.alcazaren@gmail.com.