One of my advocacies have always been traffic management simply because since the modernization of the Cebu City Traffic Operations and Management in the early 90's when the City of Cebu was under then Mayor Tomas Osmeña who invested P120 million (part of it was a grant from the Australian Government) for the Sydney Coordinated Automatic Traffic System, I have been a Board Member of CITOM.
I first took over as CITOM Chairman when the late Councilor Rogelio "Jing-Jing" Osmeña ran for City Councilor and the mayor at that time was Alvin Garcia. I only held the office for a year. Then in the Year 2000, when Mayor Tomas Osmeña won the mayoralty race, he asked me to be CITOM chief - a post that I held until 2005. I was asked to join once more in the CITOM Board until 2010. Hence, whether I liked it or not, traffic in Cebu has been part of my life. Now we are helping CITOM as a columnist, giving our critical suggestions on how to improve CITOM and our traffic as part and parcel of the basic services of Cebu City.
Towards the last week of December, Rene Mercado introduced me to the new CITOM chairman Vic Caindec, whose official position is Executive Director of CITOM. Vic and I talked a lot about the problems of traffic management and we were supposed to meet this month for a tete-a-tete. But then came the report that Vic suddenly quit his post. So I immediately called him to verify whether the report was true. Vic was in Manila, and he confirmed to me that he had to resign as he just signed up for his new job with Hilti, a Power Tool company.
Clearly, Caindec was using his head because if you are not corrupt, there is no monetary gain being a CITOM chief. So I asked Vic why he quit so suddenly. Vic told me that he was supposed to start with CITOM last October as Executive Director, but he already was asked by Hilti to join the company, but he also made some commitments to Mayor Mike Rama. So, he promised Rama that he would join CITOM first and restructure the organization to make it less of a bureaucracy then resign later.
This is exactly what I also did when I took over CITOM. After all, this is what management people do in order to make an organization streamline and efficient. Unfortunately, Vic told me that after I had left CITOM, the people who replaced me slowly returned it to its old former self, and followed the bureaucracy that plague City Hall offices. Vic also told me about certain problems within CITOM that I cannot yet reveal.
However, in his very short stint in CITOM, Caindec has done something that we former CITOM chiefs could not do. For this I salute Vic Caindec!
A case in point is when he removed the diagonal parking along F. Ramos St. something that we were prevented to do during our term for reasons that I cannot tell you. But look at F. Ramos St. today now that the diagonal parking has been removed - especially across the Velez General Hospital which used to be traffic chokepoints - traffic flow there has started to be smoother than before. I hope that with Caindec's resignation, parking along F. Ramos St will not return to its diagonal position.
Also, one of the best things that Caindec has done during his watch was when he reorganized the parking scheme along the Fuente Osmeña circle, where double or even triple parking only caused the road to become narrow and congested. Vic also put those barricades along Gorordo Ave. stopping vehicles from turning left from or to Beverly Hills or. So now, traffic is a bit smoother in that area.
The only thing left that CITOM should have done was to remove those Habal-Habals from constricting the Doña Modesta Gaisano Bridge. Without those motorcycles, traffic would be smoother in that area. Of course, there are still many illegally-parked vehicles in Gorordo Ave. whose drivers ought to be taught a lesson by towing those offending vehicles. Our roads are so narrow; any vehicle (or sidewalk vendor) parking along where the sidewalk should be should be towed or removed.
Finally, we go to the issue where Mayor Rama got so frustrated with the Department of Public Works and Highways especially on S. Osmeña St. where the road works are slower than snails. Again, this brings us to the major issue that we wrote against the DPWH - that DPWH officials just could not force their contractors to work 24/7 especially on repairing our major roads. Worse area is A.S. Fortuna Ave. where there are road works on both sides of the road. This is why if the Aquino regime is gone, DPWH has been targeted for reform. We want a new DPWH to become like call centers, who work only at night where traffic disturbance is minimal.