Failed state

Edsa had its moment of glory. It was the scene of an iconic event, an unarmed public rising representing a late-20th century phenomenon of mass citizen intervention to resolve a crisis of state.

Today, Edsa is most striking as a monument to a failed state. It is the sum of all the evils that will make hell out of any modern metropolis: the diffidence of leaders, the shortsightedness of bureaucrats, the greed of corporations, the power of criminal syndicates and, yes, the stupidity of ordinary citizens.

For those of us who must traverse this avenue every freaking day of our lives, Edsa is a curse.

I now understand why sailors in the olden days nursed every sort of superstition; they never knew how the waves would roll or the winds would blow. When they set forth to the open sea, it was always a leap of faith.

Each time I drive out to Edsa, I always feel in serious need of the services of a shaman. One never knows where the next bottleneck or logjam will be. One never really knows how long the trip will take.

Because I drive myself, I could not use the abundant time sitting on Edsa to catch up with my readings. Because traffic creeps then stops then creeps again, the tablet is useless as well. One could get arrested, I suppose, for mounting an I-pad on the steering wheel. The only thing to do sitting in traffic is to master the ancient Hindu art of staring blankly into space in quest of Nothingness.

I was told that a Japanese-funded study concluded that in five years, the SLEX will pretty much be like Edsa. Vehicle volume simply surpasses road space.

Since no new road space will be forthcoming, our only recourse is to change religion so that we carry prayer beads or switch into a trance when traffic build-up happens. Otherwise, the stress will tell on our bladders and our life-expectancy will be drastically shortened by road rages.

I read with much interest Paulo Alcazaren’s two recent pieces in this paper, “10 reasons why it floods in Manila” (STAR, June 15, 2013) and “10 reasons why Edsa is the avenue of hell” (STAR, June 22, 2013). Those two pieces brilliantly sum up, in a most readable way, the magnitude and the complexity of the problems of flooding in the metropolitan area.

Most of the factors causing the floods are fairly familiar. The most striking new information I derived from these two pieces is the extent to which politics played a role in charting the path to the present quagmire.

The most salient reason we failed to promptly address the flooding problem is the strange political set-up that is Metro-Manila. While the problems that beset this single, contiguous urban sprawl are integrated, the region’s administration is disintegrated. The 16 local governments behave like sovereign states and the MMDA plays a basically cosmetic role, incapable of performing the comprehensive planning required to save this city from itself.

It turns out Edsa was originally designed as an expressway, with service roads and no business fronting the avenue (to prevent vehicles constantly weaving in and out of the traffic flow). The major intersections were originally envisioned to be clover-leaves, presumably with ample green space.

The original design for a resplendent avenue was eaten away over time. Commercial establishments were built directly fronting the avenue. Local governments did not buy the land for clover-leaf intersections. All the band-aid adjustments done after that — the construction of the MRT without adequate provisioning for spacious terminals, the colonization of the sidewalks, the absence of regulations for billboards, etc. — produced the monster we now confront each day.

I have more frequently used the trains to bypass the crawl at street-level. To enjoy the experience, one must have the mind of a rat and the abilities of a triathlete. The commute is short but the walks are long, the stairs are steep and the carriages tightly packed: this is a facility designed to punish the commuter. I have not encountered a working escalator here for quite a while.

At the Guadalupe station, southbound, one must squeeze between a wall and a concrete post to get to more open terrain. At Taft, the commuter must pick his way through a dark and dank maze to transfer to the LRT or get across to the Macapagal Avenue side. This is not a facility; it is a public inconvenience.

The authorities tell us that new wagons will be added to the MRT by May 2015. That sound like good news.

In 2009, however, I sat on the MRTC board. We looked at plans to acquire wagons by 2010, using the financial muscle of the two government banks. Plans were finalized even then for a single-ticketing system for immediate implementation --- although we suspected people benefitting from fare box leakages were slowing things down.

It seems these plans were rediscovered only recently and will be implemented only slowly. There will be no relief for commuters for at least two more years. Meanwhile, populist groups will raise hell against fare adjustments in an over-subsidized and crumbling rail service.

On the larger matter of flooding throughout the metropolitan region, we are now happily informed — by the same officials who junked the flood-control projects of the previous administration — that the infrastructure program to mitigate the deluge will be completed in 2035. We do not know, however, who to hold responsible for that deadline.

It will probably take a century to untangle the mess Edsa has become.