CITOM: So many problems, no solutions!

I read that report that 16 traffic enforcers belonging to the Cebu City Traffic Operations & Management (CITOM) were found to have used illegal substances or drugs. Gads! This never happened in our time, when we were in CITOM. If I remember right, there should be more than 400 plus CITOM employees from administration to drivers to traffic enforcers and if 16 traffic enforcers were caught using illegal drugs it’s a huge number. The only reasonable thing for Mayor Mike Rama to do is get rid of these people.

If traffic is bad today, we can blame it on the usual December holiday rush, where people with vehicles would drive to Cebu from the different parts of the province, including those people who can afford to bring their vehicles from Negros, Bohol and even as far away as Leyte. This is why traffic every December becomes unbearable…and this goes all the way up to the Sinulog week. But then, this should never be an excuse for the CITOM management to be complacent. That there are no traffic personnel in the evenings have aggravated the situation. This is a management problem. 

Two Saturdays ago, (and I guess it happened again last Saturday evening), traffic was sheer madness along Banilad Road and for no apparent reason. It took me more than 30 minutes just to drive from the Cebu Country Club to Asilo dela Milagrosa. What’s really wrong? First of all, there were no CITOM enforcers around to handle the snarled traffic. Sure, the already snarled traffic was worsened by a taxi and a van hitting each other’s side. So let’s ask once more… why can’t CITOM solve this perennial problem of small accidents that is the principal cause of a horrendous traffic jam?

I don’t want to boast of what I did when I was CITOM Chairman, but during one of our Traffic Summits, we ended up solving this problem by letting the enforcers bring a white or yellow chalk to mark the position of the vehicles… so that after this is done, the CITOM enforcer can ask the drivers to move their vehicles on the side while he sketches the position of the vehicles. With digital cameras becoming more affordable, you can actually take photos of the positions of the accident in order to determine who is at fault. So why isn’t this being done huh?

But somehow after I left CITOM, the CITOM Board did not make this a permanent practice. Here we are… coming up with solutions to help ease our traffic congestion, but even the CITOM Board refuses to recognize our efforts and worse… they somehow allowed the traffic enforcers to do what they have been doing in the past. In my book, this is not progress, but retrogression within CITOM! Shame on them!

To tell you the truth, ever since we got the Sydney Coordinated Automatic Traffic System (SCATS) in the early 90s, traffic in Cebu City was downhill. I should know, during my stint as CITOM Chairman, I tried my level best to do something that would become some kind of a permanent improvement to help ease our traffic… but then for as long as our political establishment doesn’t have that elusive “political will”, don’t expect our politicians to solve our traffic problems.

During my term, I tried to convince then Rep. Raul del Mar for Congress to pass a law creating the Metro Cebu Traffic Authority (MCTA). But unfortunately, then Mayor Tomas Osmeña shot it down… because the biggest problem was… who would be on top of it? With then Senator John Osmeña vying for power in Cebu, Mayor Tom felt MCTA was unnecessary.

Of course, I was totally devastated because Mayor Osmeña was looking only for his own political interest and survival. He forgot that solving the traffic problem should have been priority one for his administration. While traffic was a priority at the beginning of his term as Mayor of Cebu City, he didn’t look forward to upgrade the traffic system. Worse, the City of Cebu failed miserably to maintain our traffic system. We were proud of the SCATS being used to handle traffic in Cebu City. But today, this system isn’t working as it was originally designed.

SCATS was supposed to reduce manpower. This is the problem with CITOM today. Just think, Cebu City 20 years ago didn’t have traffic in Talamban-Banilad area. There was no traffic leading to the North Reclamation Area. Today, Cebu City has grown by leaps and bounds. Yet our political leaders can’t seem to find ways to solve the problem in order to prepare Cebu City for the future.

Elections are coming on May 2013 and I’d like to hear from our politicians who want to run Cebu City Hall what their plans are as far as traffic management is concerned. Is this too much to ask? Meanwhile, motorists suffer bad traffic almost every day now. Even Saturdays and Sundays are no longer spared the bad traffic. This is a CITOM problem with no solutions!

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