How to beat bad SLEX

It’s late. You’re tired. After a long day at work, you’d like nothing more to scoot on home and have a nice, pleasant dinner with the family. The catch is you’ll have to set aside two hours for the commute. Maybe add another hour if it’s raining. Welcome to the south of Metro Manila, where bad SLEX has become a daily ritual.

Anyone who has to endure the trials and tribulations of SLEX knows what I am talking about. Southbound from Nichols three lanes merges into two just before the Bicutan interchange, a bottleneck that’s made even worse by the PNCC’s strange logic of installing concrete barriers and rubber pylons to rule out the third lane under the overpass. What is the point of a lane if it won’t be used anyway? On particularly heavy days (as opposed to annoyingly slow ones), traffic can pile up to as far as Magallanes.

By the way, the Skyway isn’t much help. E-Pass and non-E-Pass users now have the pleasure of lining up as far as one kilometer from the tollgates to get through, after which there’s the hair-raising game of edging past each other to get to the one-lane off-ramp at the end.

I can’t decide if northbound is worse. From Alabang it is a slow crawl all the way north, occasionally stopping for interminable minutes as heavy machinery used for the Skyway construction maneuvers across the road. Or maybe a truck has broken down. Or a fender-bender has occurred. Or, God forbid, all of the above. On several occasions, traffic has stopped for so long that enforcers actually instruct motorists to take the service road instead. Of course, once you’re in the service road, the traffic along the highway starts crawling again but now you are stuck in the frying pan. Talk about irony.

Still... I read somewhere that Filipinos as resilient. We’re also rather civilized. We will not park our cars on the highway and cause mass riots at the tollgates demanding our money back. We will not pull out high-powered firearms and drill all these annoying wang-wang owners full of holes.

No sir, what we will do is Tweet. And we will update our Facebook accounts to let the whole world (or at least several hundred of our friends, some of whom may actually be more than passing acquaintances) know of our plight. To get some ideas on how to deal with the SLEX, I solicited ideas on my Facebook account. It must be a hot topic, because I got 18 comments in just one hour.

Some were pragmatic (quit your job, work from home, teleport – from my bro), some were excitable (“Apology billboards are no excuse!” – that would be my mother), some were inquisitive (“Why do they have to do that counterflow at the expense of all those who’ve been patiently waiting in line?”), and I must say, some were rather suicidal (“Take the Skyway!”).

Quite a few offered creative routes circumventing SLEX, such as going via the Coastal Highway, Moonwalk, and possibly a scenic, day-long route around Laguna de Bay. Now, the problem with being creative with your driving route is that you are not alone. Everybody likes to think he or she is creative, and before you know it, you and 10,000 other motorists are jamming up a “fast” and “clean” detour.

There are a few options I have ginned up as a possible solution, culled from notes compiled while in the driver’s seat, waiting for a huge comet to fall out of the sky and put every motorist out of his misery, or at least to provide more interesting entertainment than trying to decipher that scary, colon-cleansing product billboard near Merville.

Everyone is free to try them out.

• Stock vehicle with 1-gallon water jug, biscuits, reading material, toiletry kit, sleeping bag, portable DVD player, and the latest season of 24. What better way to count the hours than with Jack Bauer?

• Purchase several dozen fireworks and set them off just before a bottleneck. Use the distraction to squeeze ahead.

• Attach an LCD screen to the roof of your car and play some, ahh interesting videos. Now everyone will want to be behind you rather than in front of you. Warning: Be prepared to face authorities at the exit.

• Pay every kropek and fish cracker vendor to sell their wares elsewhere. They are harbingers of doom, causing heavy traffic wherever they go. I might have the cause-effect logic wrong, of course.

• Bring a huge, black cloth sheet with which to cover the inevitable fender-bender along the way that’s causing traffic for miles. Guaranteed to get rid of rubberneckers who simply must slow down to gawk at the damage, however inconsequential.

• Inform the tollbooth teller that Brad Pitt is just a few cars behind you. If that doesn’t speed up the transaction, nothing will.

• Buy a Suburban and equip it with bullbars to shunt aside every motorist squeezing into your lane at the last minute. Actually, buy two Suburbans. With GM going belly-up, you might need the other one for spare parts.

Here are some of your Backseat Driver reactions from Lester Dizon’s “Riding Through the Chaos” from last week…

I also have to control myself whenever I see a man driving his child to school on his motorbike while the wife clings to him at the backseat. Sometimes, there is even a smaller child sandwiched between the man and the child sitting in front. That’s four people on a 50cc motorcycle! Truly an accident waiting to happen. By the way, I am not sure if it was you who wrote about a car repair shop in Greenhills that come highly recommeded. If you did write about this shop, can you tell me please the name of that repair shop? Thanks a lot. – jefferson0911 (That would have to be me, dear reader. And the name of the shop is Autoplus, located along EDSA near Petron Greenhills. – Ed.)

Do you think our authorities can enforce the helmet policy properly? There seem to be too many riders with no helmets – or are at least wearing mere hard hats. We need to educate them also on proper road courtesy. – smoothe

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