EDITORIAL - Duterte should take a look at Banawa road

Sometime ago, shortly after the Department of Public Works and Highways started intermittently ripping up portions of the Banawa road, The Freeman published an editorial reflecting the public's confusion and opposition to what appeared to be a total waste of government resources - the needless repair of what appeared to be a road in perfect condition.

That editorial drew a swift response from DPWH, which explained that despite what the public saw of the road's condition, it really was rotten enough to need a prompt overhaul. And how did the DPWH know that the road was rotten on the inside as opposed to what the public saw on the outside? The DPWH said it has sophisticated pieces of equipment that it drives over roads to determine their state of structural integrity.

Well, if the DPWH truly has such pieces of equipment, the public would like to see them in action, because what the public mostly sees of DPWH equipment are those that bring shame to the department. They must be truly wonderful innovations - you just drive them along roads and they tell you if the road is okay or ready to be ripped up. The public wants to know as well if there are other perfectly good roads that are being ripped up just so they can be repaired again.

And why does the ripping not involve entire stretches of road. The Banawa road was built in its entirety at one time. If there are defects in the construction they should be apparent all throughout the entire road project. So how come the road is being ripped up one block at a time, at places that are not contiguous to one another. One block is ripped up here, then another way over yonder, and so on and so forth, so that the entire road looks like one extra long checkerboard.

And then there is the matter of why the road project was started so close to the election. Why didn't the DPWH do it earlier? Why did it take its own sweet time to start if it knew the work really needed to be done? It could have had the whole month of April to do so. It even could have started the project by late March right when schools closed. Had it done so, the project would not have threatened to become such a huge inconvenience like it is now.

But the project seemed to have ground to a virtual standstill right after the election. Almost nobody is working there anymore. If there is work being done at all, it is so slow it is prolonging the agony of the riding public. The Banawa road is a major artery that not only serves some of the most populous barangays in the city but also provides a convenient shortcut away from the city center.

Some schools will be starting classes this week. And by next week, classes will be going full blast. But for the thousands of people who will be using the Banawa road, a terrible traffic nightmare awaits them because not only are many of the intermittent repairs lying unfinished, many are only just being started. Maybe it is time the public complained - to DPWH itself, to media, on social media, to the Ombudsman, or even all the way to Rodrigo Duterte.