Brilliant

We are so fortunate having such a brilliant man heading up the MMDA.

Francis Tolentino, we all recall, was the man who invented the motorcycle lanes, demarcated by blue lines right smack in the middle of the road. A rider himself, Tolentino wanted to inaugurate those lanes with his bike. Sadly, he broke a wrist the day before trying to park his motorcycle.

Those lanes, now largely ignored, pushed slow-moving cars to the innermost lanes, forcing faster vehicles to overtake on the outer lane.

Tolentino’s idea of “greening” Edsa was to put plastic pots on the walls. Given our poor maintenance culture, people regularly forget to water those plants. Lining Edsa today is the sad sight of withering plants on very dry pots.

After a few spectacular accidents involving reckless bus drivers, Tolentino decided to impose a 60 kph limit on everyone plying Commonwealth Avenue and Macapagal Boulevard. All day each day, we are now treated to the spectacle of vehicles in slow motion on two of the best roads in the metropolis.

With cars unable to move at a more efficient pace, it is an utter waste of good pavement. What the heck, we haven’t had a really tragic crash lately. One has to be really creative to be able to smash up any vehicle at 60 kph.

When traffic stopped due to flooding, Tolentino blamed the flood-control projects for submerging the roads. The DPWH returned the blame by saying the MMDA was slow in approving the urgent projects, causing them to cluster just as the rains came.

When España Boulevard became impassable, Tolentino’s response was to put up an MMDA satellite office right where the floods tend to be most severe. In that satellite office, he stockpiled rubber boats and stationed rescue teams.

That office will do nothing to stop the flooding, of course, but at least people can expect to be rescued when the waters become life threatening. 

Now that people are complaining of choked traffic at all hours of the day, Tolentino comes up with yet another brilliant idea. Now he wants to expand the number-coding scheme so that vehicles are banned from the road twice during the workweek.

One could almost imagine the brilliant thought process that led him to this proposal. Vehicles cause traffic congestion. Therefore, if there are no vehicles, there will be no traffic congestion.

A lot of people, philistines really, seem unable to grasp the brilliant analysis that led the MMDA chair to this astounding conclusion. These philistines, up in arms, say that the two-day ban will disrupt business, screw up schedules and abort deliveries.

The truly rich, they say, will buy more cars and still be on the road. The poor, alas, because they cannot buy extra cars, will just have to bear the pain. Over the years the number coding scheme has been in place, wealthier Filipinos bought extra cars to deal with the ban. As a consequence, traffic volume has not been reduced. 

Expanding the car ban will, given this experience, simply raise the demand for more cars. The rich will have Monday cars, Tuesday cars and so on and on. Logistics companies will try to cope with just-in-time deliveries by expanding their fleets. At some point, we will return to Square One.

Tolentino claims the expanded car ban worked in some Latin American capital. The philistines say he should study Bangkok instead. The Thai capital had the same traffic congestion we now have. They solved the problem by building elevated highways, installing a subway system, increasing light rail, using river transport integrated with the bus lines. Today, it is such a breeze to get around Bangkok.

The Thais must be a little feeble. If Tolentino were governor of greater Bangkok, he would have solved traffic congestion by simply banning vehicles from the road — thus averting the need to invest billions in building world-class infrastructure. In the process, however, he would have torpedoed the Thai economy.

Objection

Last week, I wrote about Sen. Loren Legarda receiving an outstanding alumna award from the UP Alumni Association for her work on disaster risk reduction in the face of climate change. I was surprised by the strong adverse reaction from some sectors to that piece.

One particularly angry letter comes from Melex Francia, representing a group called Samahang Anti-Kurakot ng Sambayanang Inaapi (SAKSI). I will give the objecting group some space, although prudence dictates the entire angry letter not be reproduced here.

Francia takes both the UPAA and the UP Los Baños chancellor (a friend of Legarda) to task for choosing to confer the award on the senator notwithstanding a case filed at the Ombudsman for her failure to declare a P200 million Forbes property and a P36 million New York condominium in her SALN.

The undeclared properties suggest ill-gotten wealth, considering a senator makes only P75,000 a month. Unless she is cleared of the same charges for which she voted to convict former chief justice Renato Corona, the UPAA must desist from putting her up for emulation or rehabilitating her with an award, says Francia.

Francia accuses the UPAA of selling its soul, and the UP for selling its prestige, in exchange for P100,000 worth of tickets to the awards ceremony Legarda was supposed to have purchased. The group Francia represents therefore considers the award a “sham.”

The rest of the letter is pure rant. It might be a dim view of the award handed out last month, but it is, it turns out, a view with a constituency that deserves to be heard.