EDITORIAL - Night or day in the city

The Regional Development Council has approved a resolution calling on both government agencies and public utilities that have any road construction or road repair work to do it at night.

The decision took into consideration the fact that there are more motor vehicles on the road during the day so that any road work done during that time will naturally result in traffic jams.

According to this view, since there are fewer motor vehicles on the road at night, this would be the best time to do the said road works if traffic jams are to be avoided. The logic appears to be neat, right? Not necessarily.

First off, traffic jams are not caused by road works alone. The fact is, the growth of Metro Cebu’s road network has not matched the growth in the number of motor vehicles, such that it is literally getting choked by this imbalance.

Road works do not happen everyday. Yet traffic jams have become a daily occurrence. Thus, either the Metro learns to live with the problem without looking for scapegoats, or it starts looking for truly meaningful, practical and feasible solutions to the problem.

A simple juggling of times for the conduct of road works will not solve the problem. The problem is too complex for such a simplistic solution. Metro Cebu is an exploding metropolis. Its nights are no longer quiet and lonely, if that is what the RDC resolution meant.

Relegating road works to nighttime does not ensure a traffic jam-free metropolis. It will depend on where the road work is and what time of the night it is undertaken. In a growing number of areas, there is hardly any day or night difference in traffic volume.

On the other hand, even granting there is some sparsity in night time traffic volume to allow for practical road work to be done, another problem crops up in the fact that lesser cars on the road makes for faster cars, in which case the danger to road workers increases.

Given the fact that Filipinos are no sticklers for road safety, the resolution’s attempt to solve a problem might actually cause the birth of another problem — that of road accidents caused by too many road works being done at night.