Treating COVID-19 with Paracetamol

No, this is not about pneumonia, nor is this about Paracetamol either. This is about holding a traffic summit to come up with a traffic master plan. To see this better, let’s see what we mean by traffic in the first place --an abbreviation of “traffic congestion”. It’s something we dislike, something we complain about every day, anywhere around the world. Because we always want to go from one place to another faster. The sheer number of vehicles on the road slows us down. This is traffic congestion. But it’s not a problem.

Traffic is a symptom, an indication of a problem. And you don’t cure symptoms, you only alleviate them while trying to cure the real “sickness.” When you have COVID-19, you usually have a fever and take Paracetamol, but this does not cure COVID-19, it alleviates the fever. That’s exactly the same as traffic. It’s a symptom of the deeper real problem --transportation. Or more appropriately, the issue of mobility --the very basic freedom of people to move, earn a living and contribute to the economy and nation-building.

Think of it this way --traffic is bad. But why should we have a master plan for something bad? Are we planning for a bad future? We can say we will plan for a better “traffic” situation in the future. But traffic congestion will always naturally get worse. The issue is mobility --how to move people every day, especially from home to work and back. That is the problem. That is the sickness, and that is what we should treat. Treat the disease, not the symptom!

What we need is a public transportation master plan, not a traffic master plan. And there are two already done for Metro Cebu: the DOTr-Public Transportation Strategic Plan for Metro Cebu (2011) and the JICA-Master Plan Study and Institutional Development or Urban Transport System in Metro Cebu (2018). Why talk of a new plan when many haven’t even read the previous comprehensively studied ones? And yes, these are master plans that took one to two years to complete; the data gathering itself needed around six months to do. No one produces a master plan by calling for a “summit” and producing it one in a month!

If we want a better urban transport future for Cebu City and/or Metro Cebu, we need to seriously plan for long-term mobility. The last full-blown Household Interview Survey (HIS) was in 2010, and our information/data terribly needs updating. Then and only then can we start talking of a mobility master plan. Talking of a “traffic summit” is all for show --more than 90% of the attendees will be going by car and wouldn’t know the hardships of two- or three-ride daily routines, transferring from one PUV to another walking on non-existent sidewalks, or waiting and scrambling (fighting) for rides on the road every morning. The summit will talk for a day or two and magically produce a long-term “master plan” for traffic, which is not even a problem at all but a symptom of a deeper problem. It’s like treating COVID-19 with Paracetamol.