The Talamban-Pit-os road project

A few months ago, I decided to write again in this column my unwholesome traffic experience each time I visit my small garden in the mountain barangay of Paril. The flow of traffic in the Talamban to Pit-os stretch is excruciatingly slow that even the supposed patience of a septuagenarian like me is unforgivably taxed. More so in coming home in the afternoon somewhere at four to five o’clock when the traffic snarl is terrible. More often than not, it is moving at snail pace. To think that I do not drive anymore! How much worse are the expletives uttered by those men and women behind the steering wheel? Oh, that is unimaginable. Why so?

I used to estimate that road span to be something like six to seven kilometers to justify a usual 25-minute drive on late Saturday afternoon. To be more accurate, I punched some keys on my cellphone. The internet even worsened my feeling. I found out that the Pit-os to Bacayan span is just 1.8 kilometers which is supposedly negotiable in at most five minutes and the Bacayan to Talamban road stretch is about 2.3 kilometers which can be negotiated is seven minutes. All told, the internet says that the distance between Pit-os and Talamban is merely 4.1 kilometers and travel time is a tolerable 12 minutes. Not double or, at times, triple than what the internet indicates.

I like to believe that our government leaders also experienced this terribly slow traffic flow on this stretch as early as fifteen years ago. Mayor Tomas Osmeña then saw it fit to address the situation for the benefit of us, ordinary citizen-travelers. If I remember it correctly, it was in the year 2010, when the city government appropriated P156,000,000 to widen the road. I do not know though if there was a counter funding given by the national government.

What I saw, after much publicity, were red markers placed in many points along the way to indicate how wide would the road become. Wow, that would be from a narrow two-lane street to a four-lane avenue. In fact, there were houses that were demolished to give way to the widening. I distinctly remember that at the back of the Talamban Sports Complex, which was supposedly the starting point of the project, there were structures that were leveled off and their corresponding concrete fence was set back. Not far away, the land owner had to build another fence about easily three meters back to give way to the widening. Today the old concrete fence still stands as mute witness to the apparently unjustified cessation of the work. For indeed, long and behold the initial road re-engineering sputtered. The visible large crew of workers got disturbingly trimmed and then they eventually were no longer seen. They disappeared. Nobody was working on the project anymore. The solution to the traffic problem (in the Talamban to Pit-os road span) that then Mayor Osmeña appeared bent to accomplish fizzled when he left office.

I am happy that Mayor Osmeña is back even if as our city vice mayor. It will not be difficult for him to persuade the new honorable Mayor Nestor Archival to re-start that long delayed project. After all, this was his baby, I think. That infra structure undertaking then can be the first major project of the new administration.

When this road widening work is done, it will serve primarily the transportation requirements of at about ten mountain barangays and the emerging residential subdivisions in the Bacayan, Pit-os, Binaliw areas in addition to the more than a dozen villages already existing. More importantly, it will encourage businessmen to replicate the growth of the establishments now dotting the Cebu-Balamban trans central highway. Selfishly, it will make my weekly trip to my garden comfortably quick.