Wanted: Fix our traffic systems right now!
For our special presentation on our talk show “Straight from the Sky,” we help launch the book of a dear Don Jose “Pepe” Rodriquez who was once the editor-in-chief of the Spanish international news agency EFE and was director of Instituto Cervantes and director for the Spanish Program for Cultural Cooperation. Don Pepe was in Cebu for the launching of his 5th book entitled “Front Pages of Philippine History.” It is a compilation of selected front pages of Philippine newspapers from Don Pepe’s personal archives; some of them as far back at the turn of the century, many of them in Spanish.
Don Pepe’s book was sponsored by the Manila Bulletin’s Don Emilio Yap and boasts an introduction by Nobel Prize winner in Literature Mario Vargas Llosa. I recommend this book to all journalists because it gives you a historical timeline of the front-page news in the Philippines. Some of those front page news would even surprise you… making you conclude that not much has changed in the country a hundred years ago. As they say, the more you want to change things, the more things stay the same.
For instance, there was a headline dating back to 1952 entitled “Pork Barrel Eliminated!” which only proves that the pork barrel was already hated by the people 60 years ago. Then you can see a lot of headlines when the Philippines was granted independence by the United States of America. So Independence Day on July 4, 1946 was front-page news and it just makes you wonder why the Philippines today celebrates Independence Day on the 12th of June? As I pointed out many times before, no one, not even a President should monkey around with our history.
So watch this very interesting launching of Don Pepe Rodriquez’s book on SkyCable’s channel 61 at 8:00 tonight with replays on Wednesday and Saturday same time and channel. We also have replays on MyTV’s channel 30 at 9:00 tonight and on Wednesday and Friday at 7:00AM and 9:00PM.
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If you went out during the rush hour last Friday night, you were witness to one of the heaviest traffic jams that I’ve ever seen in Cebu City in a long time. Of course most motorists dismiss this as natural because it was a Friday night and a payday. Many of our friends who came from the Casino Español arrived in Harold’s Hotel for the 82nd anniversary of the Rotary Club of Cebu an hour and a half late. This is a trip that should have taken only 7 minutes in ordinary traffic.
Before the Rotary event, I was at the Aboitiz Media Christmas Party at the Grand Convention (Grandcon) and went to Harold’s Hotel around 9:00PM and traffic was still bad from the University of the Philippines. So is this the traffic we can expect now that December is upon us? I just read in last Wednesday’s The Freeman that the city’s traffic system will soon get an upgrade if and when the Cebu City Council approves the P150 million budget. So the big question is…what’s keeping our city councilors from approving this P150 million budget to upgrade our already antiquated Sydney Coordinated Automatic Traffic Systems?
On my last year as CITOM chairman in 2005, I asked the City of Cebu to purchase a brand new mainframe computer for the SCATS system but that was only the first step in rehabilitating our traffic systems that were new in the early 90’s. Just imagine, if you had a computer that’s at least 10 years old, it would certainly be obsolete by then because of exponential growth in computer development. So what’s the Cebu City Council waiting for, turn this issue into another political ballgame?
I must warn our friends in the Cebu City Council that their constituents are already fed up with their playing around with our daily lives. We need to fix our traffic problems and they shouldn’t be wasting our time, lest we retaliate against those members of the Cebu City Council who oppose the approval of this fund and make them lose in the next elections.
Meanwhile, still on traffic, we turn our sights once more to the City of Mandaue where also last Friday traffic was snarled because a vehicle fell into those diggings that the contractors have left opened with no regard to safety. Again we ask Mayor Jonas Cortes to whip those erring contractors and make them move faster and not allow them to open more ditches until they finish those that they are still surely but slowly working on.
I also heard during last Tuesday’s 888 Forum that the plan to transfer Camp Lapu-Lapu to Lapu-Lapu City has remained in limbo. This plan was a project of then Gov. Gwen F. Garcia, which could have developed that part of Cebu City to more IT Centers that bring more jobs to Cebuanos and best of all… it could have opened new roads that could have decongested the traffic-prone Banilad Road. But no one made a follow up on this project that could have greatly benefited many Cebuanos. But no one’s doing it!
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