Discipline: The only way to better traffic!

I couldn't help but notice the A-plus metro section of a national daily that Quezon City is poised to scrap the Amusement Tax on local films shown within Quezon City. This is something that I have been telling the Cebu City Council in the past 20 years if they truly wanted to help the beleaguered Filipino Movie Industry.

Well, it seems that Quezon City under the leadership of Mayor Feliciano Belmonte will be the first Local Government Unit (LGU) to stop giving lip service to help our movie industry and do something positive to help revive it! Let's see what the City of Cebu would do with regards the Amusement Taxes. If they can't remove it, then the least we expect our city to do is fight Film Piracy; after all, when theaters lose the City of Cebu also loses!

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I hope that by now, you must have heard of the Dilaab Movement of our dear friend, Fr. Carmelo Diola who asks everyone who cares for their country to commit themselves to a "Heroic Christian Citizenship" by doing the most simple things that Filipino citizens ought to do, like obeying traffic rules. If you are a passenger on a jeepney, the right thing to do is ask the jeepney driver to stop at the next stop sign, rather than at the corner where you just might alight at a sign that says, "No Stopping Allowed". If only they all learned the proper way to get in or out of a jeepney....sigh!

Talking about traffic rules, my good friend, Councilor Sylvan "Jak d' Wak" Jakosalem, chairman for Traffic in the Cebu City Council has proposed yet another ordinance that would minimize traffic problems. This time, he proposes to penalize contractors whose construction equipment impede the flow of traffic. The big question there is; supposedly no construction can start without approval of the Cebu City Traffic Operations and Management (Citom) that means those obstructing construction equipment has to get the nod of Citom before they can start the construction work?

If you ask me, before Councilor Jakosalem should even start a debate on this issue, I suggest that he sit down with the Cebu Contractors Association Inc. whom I'm sure is more than willing to work things out with the City of Cebu without having to go to the extreme resort of making an ordinance just for contractors. The problem really depends on the construction site. If it is in a congested area, then measures must be made to assure the motorists that the construction would not impede the flow of traffic.

Talking about contractors, it always gets me especially during rainy days when huge trucks leave the construction site, their tires leaving mud along the road. There is supposed to be a penalty for this infraction. But again, why go through all that where only the driver gets penalized? Perhaps the Contractors Association ought to develop a system whereby no truck leaves the construction site whose tires is not washed with water so they don't dirty up our streets or main thoroughfares. It's really a matter of habit, for as long as contractors make it standard operating procedure.

We should be serious in minimizing traffic snarls or obstruction. Allow me to point to you a hardware store just across the Grand Majestic Restaurant. This hardware has no parking at all. Yet every single day, its battered old Ford Fiera violates the no-parking sign and worse, they even bring in sand on our streets. In my day, we used to apprehend the driver of this vehicle almost everyday but that's the best we could do in the absence of an ordinance penalizing repeat offenders!

Cebu is plagued with bad drivers simply because we can violate traffic rules with impunity. During our stint in Citom, we published a long list of names of jeepney drivers who owed the City of Cebu P180,000 in fines. We published them because they refused to pay and in fairness to these erring drivers, they can no longer afford to pay such huge amounts. It is for this reason why we had many jeepney strikes because the drivers insisted that those penalties have already been prescribed.

Again, for the nth time, I suggest to the City Council through Councilor Jak Jakosalem that we come up with a "Strike Three You're Out" policy against repeat traffic offenders. If we have such an ordinance, believe me, motorist would think twice or thrice before violating our traffic rules for fear that their license would be suspended (at least for driving in Cebu City) if they violated too many of Cebu City's traffic rules. This is the best way to bring discipline on our streets and I dare say that since most cities in this country look up to Cebu City's Traffic system, then we should continue leading the way to a better-run and traffic-efficient city.

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