EDITORIAL - As good as it gets, part II

If Mayor Michael Rama believes that road widening is the solution to the traffic problems besetting Cebu City, the best thing for him to do is to just go ahead and do it instead of trying to criticize other initiatives meant to address the same problems.

Road widening as proposed by Rama, and flyovers as proposed by Rep. Cutie del Mar, with funding already in the pipeline, do not necessarily have to result in a clash of words between the two Cebuano leaders. On the contrary, they can complement each other.

Flyovers deal mainly with easing traffic at major intersections. With the possible sole exception of Rama, there is probably no Cebuano who can say in all honesty that flyovers have not helped ease traffic at intersections.

On the other hand, the purpose of road widening is much, well, wider — which is to say it is meant to accommodate a greater volume of traffic and allow it to move with greater ease. But every Cebuano who has ever used a widened road will tell you it has not served that purpose.

There are two main reasons why this is so: 1) Widened roads always end up as private parking spaces, vending areas and car wash bays. 2) Widened roads have to end somewhere, always in a narrow road, creating worse bottlenecks because wider roads have attracted more vehicles.

Then there is the need to coordinate with other local governments. A fine example is the very wide road starting from the SRP going north, which not only gets squeezed entering Mandaue City but also gets stupidly diverted to Mactan by the bright boys in charge of Mandaue traffic.

But that is putting the cart before the horse. Before Rama starts criticizing well-funded proposals like flyovers, he should first see whether the city can afford a massive road widening, considering that the city’s finances are being eaten alive by the huge SRP debt.

Here’s the deal. Flyovers are about intersections. Flyovers already have funding. Road widening ends in narrow streets. Road widening gets taken over as vending areas, private garages, car wash bays. If there is no money to cover pot holes, what is there to spend widening roads?

Road widening is not entirely useless, however. It can actually work, provided all roads are widened. Anything less than that makes the whole enterprise fail. So, if Rama only has money to widen Espongklong, his time would be better spent singing.