Are we hopeless?

I was going around the Ayala Museum some weeks ago, admiring the wonderful dioramas depicting various stages in our nation’s history. There was this scene whose caption was a quote from Graciano Lopez Jaena. It goes like this:

“A country like the Philippines ought to be a great commercial country with an active domestic trade and consequently she should have a considerable export trade. Such would be true if roads were numerous and the means of communication between the towns were easy and extensive. But nothing of the sort is true.”

That sounds to me like even before we concocted a government agency named DOTC, its mission was already critical. The country’s economic stagnation can be blamed on inadequate transportation and communication since the time of Lopez Jaena in the late 1800s.

This state of affairs is completely disappointing for me because I actually witnessed the time when our Asean neighbors had way more underdeveloped transportation and communication infrastructure. That was in the late ’60s and early ’70s when I had the opportunity to travel to Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and yes, even Singapore and found them rather provincial.

Budget Secretary Butch Abad blamed government’s “technical deficiency” as the reason why our infra projects are stalled. He said we don’t have the local expertise in these areas. That sounds like a bad excuse for failure.

When I posted that comment of Sec. Abad on my Facebook wall, my FB friends reacted by saying that we should import such expertise if we don’t have them and we need them. Actually, I suspect we just don’t trust our own.

Of course we have local experts in transportation and communication. One of them, Rene Santiago, is making a good living as a consultant for many of our Asean neighbors on this exact same thing.

Indeed, I can’t understand why the administration hasn’t heard of him and harnessed his long years of international experience in this field. Rene is like many expat Filipino technical experts working on world class projects abroad.

Sometimes we lose them because they feel their services are not appreciated here, got politicized out of the country and not paid enough. What is happening with our weather forecasters, some of them with advanced graduate degrees in meteorology, must be happening in other areas too.

One of the reasons I regularly attend the meetings of a group of economists, the Foundation for Economic Freedom, is the chance to exchange notes with Rene Santiago, the transport expert I knew from our UP days. He was a graduate of the UP College of Engineering and is a no-nonsense kind of guy… the type an ambitious, politically connected but incompetent bureaucrat will want to put down.

The reason I didn’t buy the bulls—t of the DOTC officials from the start is because Rene gave our group a comprehensive presentation on the major rail and highway projects three years ago. He presented us a timeline that took into account typical bureaucratic delays and came to the conclusion that DOTC will run out of time on all the projects.

I didn’t want to believe him then as I was clinging to the hope that the Aquino administration and specially Mar Roxas will be so on the ball that these projects will zoom along. Rene said he would treat me to a Wagyu steak dinner if any of those big projects are actually completed before June 2016. It doesn’t seem like I will be having such a feast at all.

Rene also had some common sense ideas on what to do about our traffic problem. I wrote about his observations on this topic last Nov. 19. His suggestions were just lost in EDSA’s polluted air.

Amy Pamintuan, our editor in chief, wrote last Monday about a report released last week by the National Center for Transportation Studies that estimated traffic jams in Metro Manila in the decade until 2012 cost P1.513 trillion in lost productivity and added fuel costs. She went on to report how foreign ambassadors miss important appointments because of our desperate traffic conditions.

“Traffic jams torment Pinoys and foreigners alike,” Amy wrote, “but I am mentioning the foreign diplomats because they are reporting to their capitals the situation in this host country, and what prospective investors and travelers might expect to encounter.” Definitely, another investment disincentive!

We talk and curse all the time about this traffic problem but nothing ever happens. We have not been lucky enough to have officials with bright ideas and the political will to implement these.

I wrote last November how Rene tried to estimate the cost of traffic jams on our economy based on the Vehicle Operating Cost model. Here is his take:

“Using 40 kph as non-congested norm for cities compared to what we now regularly experienced (15 kph on six out of seven days a week), the cost is P48 billion annually. That excludes value of time.

“At 40 kph, a journey of 40 km takes 60 minutes; at 15kph, same journey takes 160 minutes. An improvement of five kph on average traffic flow cuts 40 minutes for that same journey.

“Overall, a five-kph improvement translates into P20 billion savings per year in vehicle operating cost not counting P300 billion in time savings.”

Let me go through Rene’s thoughts about our traffic problem as I wrote about it last November:

The bad news is… Rene thinks “we have virtually exhausted all the less painful solutions in the past.” The long term solutions, will take decades to realize assuming there’s political will.

Rene doesn’t believe building more roads is a solution. He thinks it will only increase vehicular traffic. “The completion of a new road may indeed produce relief, but that will be transitory. We cannot pave over the entire metropolis, even if we have the money (which we don’t have). Besides, the increase in the vehicle population exceeds our capacity to expand our road network.”

That’s why Rene is saying we must make the best use of our current roads. “Our road network is inadequate, and we should maximize its capacity. That is the primary objective of traffic management, and the daily chore of MMDA. Right now, we are misusing our available road space – estimated at about 5,000 kilometers.

“How to get more throughput from our limited road space? Rehabilitate, upgrade and expand the computerized signaling system that enables coordination of signal timing and patterns across the road network, from one intersection to the next.

“After 20 years and four project phases, the system has expanded to cover about 435 intersections by 2000. Instead of expanding the system, as what a modern metropolis do, Metro Manila moved backward and dismantled nearly 50 percent of the intersections in favor of the primitive and uncoordinated U-turn schemes.

“With a reduced coverage, the effectiveness of the signalization was drastically reduced and with it the overall capacity of the network. Most, if not all, of what remains have outdated timing patterns.”

Anyway, the point I want to emphasize here is the vital importance of transport infrastructure to our economic development. The failure of DOTC officials to fulfill their mandate and deliver those big ticket projects is a gross disservice to the Filipino people, as Lopez Jaena would have concluded.

I believe we have a number of local experts who can make a difference if government handles them right. Pinoy experts have the motivation to help make things better. They live here and suffer the consequences of failure. They also have the love of country to want to see our country progress and the poverty of our people eliminated.

It had been over a hundred years after Lopez Jaena and we still have the same problem, only more serious. Will it take another hundred years for DOTC to get it right and on time? I sure hope not. I don’t believe we are truly that hopeless.

Lucky Me

To ease our distress over the traffic problem, we joke about it. One joke I saw on Facebook during that Monday evening rain that turned EDSA and C5 into a parking lot up to midnight goes like this:

Why are traffic jams similar to Lucky Me Instant Noodles?

Because with both, you only have to add some water.

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is bchanco@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco