EDITORIAL – City badly needs motorcycle lanes

Whatever happened to that proposal to have a motorbike lane designated for Cebu City streets? The proposal was made by traffic authorities and endorsed to a city councilor to craft the necessary legislation. With elections coming, is the proposed legislation so politically sensitive it is best left for the next set of city councilors to tackle?

Needless to say, the proposed motorbike lane makes sense. Many, if not most, major cities and other self-respecting places in the world already have such lanes designated in their streets. Designating bike and motorbike lanes helps in ensuring smoother traffic flow. It also promotes safety in the streets. Cebu City, with its first world pretensions, ought to have one.

Motorcycle drivers, not just in Cebu but throughout the Philippines, are notorious tempters of fate. They cut across lanes and overtake from all sides. Worse, they come at you from the opposite direction in your own lane. With no designated lane of their own, they tend to occupy whichever lane they please, including the fast lanes, even when they are going slow. And they often disregard warning sounds from other motorists' horns, at times getting angry on being honked at.

As it is, streets in the Philippines, not just in Cebu City, are increasingly getting chaotic. Unless the authorities start getting a grip on things, the time will not be very far off when road rage involving motorcycles will become the latest problem urban dwellers and city leaders will have to increasingly deal with. Most problems become unsolvable not because they are but because attempts to solve them came too late.

The authorities have to understand that in the streets, as well as in most everywhere else, there is an intense competition for space that simply cannot be ignored. In such a competition, it is necessary to introduce and adopt certain ground rules or rules of conduct, otherwise it will be every man for himself and chaos will set in.

It is no longer enough to be a bystander and hope problems will go away. Urban problems are not going anywhere. They are going to stay. And they tend to get more complicated with each passing they that they remain unacted upon. Cebu City, as the second most important city in the Philippines, cannot remain a passive player. It has to set the pace if it wants to be globally competitive.

Cebu City likes to boast of being way up there among the global cities. But when it comes to traffic and traffic management, the boast often rings hollow in face of the reality on the ground. And the sad reality is that there is chaos in Cebu City streets. Worse, there is chaos because the authorities are either absent or do not know how to approach street problems and are at best haphazard and tentative in asserting their authority in managing traffic.