At the heart of most arguments opposing plans to construct more flyovers in Cebu City is vested interests. Motherhood statements about aesthetics and the temporariness of the solution all sound nice and convincing, until you strip away the words and expose the motives.
It is not really the ugliness of the flyovers or the temporariness of the solution that drives the opposition but the perceived effects these flyovers can have on various interests, be they businesses or real properties.
Even the prayerful nuns at Asilo de la Medalla Milagrosa are not exactly being forthright about their opposition. Is it really the flyover that rankles them or just the prospect of having to give up and share a part of their property for the common good?
Many issues have divided or threatened to divide this city morally in the past, but no public displays of prayerful protests ever manifested themselves as forcefully and as openly as now, when the issue happens to threaten the Asilo’s material possessions.
Other flyover oppositors also conveniently ignore the fact that flyovers are not being constructed to become things of beauty. They are not objects of art to be admired, photographed, and filed away in scrapbooks or posted on Facebook.
If these bleeding hearts for urban beauty are truly honest with themselves, why the heck do they never raise a peep against, say, “spaghetti wires” that dangle from one post to another all over the city? How about potholes and garbage? Or giant billboards?
What flyovers lack in beauty they make up with function. They serve an immediate and specific purpose, no matter how temporary in the eyes of some. Beauty you can judge right away. But function is judged by performance. Any verdict before the fact is not only unfair but wrong.
The best option is, of course, to have a masterplan. But no such masterplan exists. Worse, no masterplan exists for conditions that needed a masterplan 50 years ago. You miss the once-weekly bus and you are forced to walk, because foregoing the trip is not an option.
Unlike life in the 1960s when the luxury of time and space was abundant, everything in this day and age moves and grows exponentially and fast. And everyone fights and scrambles for every inch of available space.
What masterplan anyone may attempt to draw up today should be intended to cope with conditions as far ahead as 50 years hence, not what to do right now in case we decide to do away with those planned flyovers.
If that masterplan for the future calls for the removal of all flyovers by then, then by all means let us tear down these structures. They may cost millions to build now, but by tomorrow they shall have paid for more than they cost. Better to pay that than the cost of doing nothing.
Oppositors to the proposed flyovers are no different from those behind that monstrosity of a folly called Road Revolution. They are idealists who keep their heads so high up in the clouds their feet no longer touch the ground.
As Cebuanos, we only want nothing but the best for our city and our province. But more often than not, the best is simply just a tad out of reach and we are left with having to cope with what we have and are capable of doing.
Circumstances, after all, do not always match or take kindly to our intentions. It is how we measure up to the conditions at hand that eventually defines us. Certainly we do not want to be defined as a people who waited and waited to take the winning shot that never came.