With the city bugged by a worsening traffic problem, and the probable solution clearly lying elsewhere than a mere rerouting of traffic or the curtailment of vehicle access to certain areas, traffic officials are now at a quandary on how to come to grips with this mess.
Actually, there is no need for the city council to issue an order clearing sidewalks of obstructions because there is an existing ordinance against sidewalk vending and this ordinance has neither been repealed nor suspended. Its effectivity continues to this day.
But this we got to see. This is a truly interesting development, a new twist in the city's increasingly desperate situation. For clearing up the sidewalks of obstructions is easier said than done.
To make everything clear, let it be clarified that, by obstructions, is meant not just inanimate objects made up of makeshift structures but real, living and breathing human beings, people who are trying to eke out an existence there on that congested strip of pavement.
These people come in a wide variety of names, but by and large they are called vendors, of an assortment of goods too mind-boggling to even start enumerating. There is another name that, for all practical purposes, also applies to them --- voters.
While they do serve some purpose as part of a thriving underground economy, still it would have been easier to get rid of them had they merely been just pure sidewalk vendors. But it is the fact of their also being voters that makes them such a formidable obstacle to remove.
And that is why it is interesting to find out what happens to the request to have them removed. Our guess is that until we elect somebody with suicidal political tendencies, no leader would dare mount any action against sidewalk vendors and see it through to the end.