Delayed

Today, even the slightest downpour manages to flood Metro Manila’s streets. Last Wednesday, a slight downpour caused a flashflood in Makati that tied up traffic for hours. Even in the driest of days, traffic is choked.

The infernal traffic situation in the metropolitan area inflicts a cost of over P2 billion each day. It is cost incurred in terms of wasted fuel, delays in delivery and lost working hours. 

That cost computation does not include the drastic decline in the quality of life of inhabitants of this urban tangle. People need to rise up before daybreak to get to work and return home close to midnight. There is not enough time to sleep, let alone cultivate family life. The toll on the people’s health — physical and emotional — is incalculable.

At the commuter rail stations, people line up for two hours to get a ride on overloaded carriages. When it rains, people stand in flooded streets until close to midnight waiting for rides. Even those with cars have no certainty over how much time it would take to get from one point to the next.

Movement in this city has become a form of cruel and unusual punishment.

What makes this condition even more unbearable is that our government knew all along what needed to be done. All that was absent was a sense of urgency — or perhaps the competence to move the solutions from the drawing boards to the streets.

Some time ago, the Japanese government, through the JICA, did us the favor of funding a study on the traffic and transit systems in the National Capital Region. That study told us exactly what we need to do: build 137 kilometers of new roads, 78 kilometers of urban expressways and more than 200 kilometers of new rail transit lines, both elevated and underground.

All we have heard from the DOTC about these recommendations is that they will study the study. That captures the attitude of this laid-back government. The bureaucrats responsible for solving the problems have such great aptitude for undertaking studies and no inclination to move quickly on the ground.

The recommendations put forward by the JICA study are not for the next generation. They were supposed to have been done yesterday.

Should the decrepit MRT-3 system be forced to close down weeks from now, simply because there are no more replacement rails in stock for the ones that cracked, imagine the havoc commuters will be forced to bear. At the moment, the MRT-3 is no longer just a hazard for those who ride it. It is a hazard for those who use the road underneath the rail line, because trains could be falling from above.

Incompetence is bad enough. More disturbing, is the increasing possibility that corruption is the reason the MRT’s maintenance has suddenly become so inept.

Connector

The icon of official ineptitude has to be the proposed NLEX-SLEX connector road. Apart from relieving city roads of the traffic load moving from one expressway to the other, the connector road likewise offers a clear path from the NAIA to the Clark airport.

Four years ago, Metro Pacific Tollways Development Corporation (MPTDC) began negotiating with government for a concession agreement to enable construction of the connector road. There is no question this is a vital piece of infra that would have dramatic effects on relieving traffic congestion.

Even better, the project will be entirely financed by the private sector. The investment will be recovered on a pay-as-you-use basis, a vastly more equitable method than the vast subsidies from taxpayer money given to the old-style government-funded projects.

In a manner typical of this administration, DOTC bureaucrats hewed and hawed. They looked into every imaginable legal complication. Otherwise, they simply sat on the proposal, allowing it to gather dust while traffic built up in the streets.

It is curious that all senior appointed officials of the DOTC are lawyers. None of them are engineers. Lawyers are experts in delay. In the case of the connector road, the lawyers have found every excuse not to begin work on the project.

Had work begun on the connector road four years ago, the project should be operational by now. That would have brought much relief from the traffic jams that now steal P2 billion each day from all of us.

Consider this: the number of vehicles using Metro Manila’s roads must have close to doubled over the last decade. During that past decade, not a single kilometer of new road space has been built. Of course, traffic hardly moves even on the driest days.

Another major infra project in the doldrums for months is the Cavite-Laguna Expressway (CALAx). Some issues were raised after the bidding was done. The matter was submitted to the Office of the President for adjudication. That was many months ago. The Palace has not acted on the dispute to this day.

When this administration took over, contracts were being perfected with assistance from the Belgian government to dredge Laguna de Bay and use the material to build a ring dike around that body of water. The dike would eventually serve as a new circumferential road linking the metropolis to the lakeside towns of Laguna and Rizal. That project was arbitrarily scrapped and the Belgians have taken us to international arbitration courts.

That project might have simultaneously addressed the problem of flooding and lack of road space. It should have been substantially completed by now had it not been scrapped.

All that is now water under the bridge, and onto our streets, another testament to ineptitude.