Inclusive Transport - the arithmetic of road space

Last Thursday we started off on the numerous dimensions to inclusive transport.  The usual discussions usually hover on issues of mobility, especially among the less privileged sectors - the women, children, elderly, and the Persons with Disabilities (PWDs).  Parking that aside, let's concentrate on the more ideological one - the provision of access to the poor as against the rich.  Forgive me for sounding “socialistic” as what DOTC Asst. Secretary Jim Feliciano would call it, but I believe the root of vertical mobility issues in the world are ideological in nature, not technical or scientific.

Well, it's still ultimately based on physical terms, so let's try to do a very basic review on that.  As in economics, the “science of allocating scarce resources,”transport congestion centers on road space.  Look at it this way - if we have an unlimited supply of road space, we won't have the problems that we have now in our metro cities.  Just expand the road as wide as you can, stack up elevated expressways on top of each other up to as many “storeys” as you want.  That is, if you have the money.

A person standing in a room or on the road needs space.  How much? It varies a lot depending on the person, shaped by personal preferences and cultural inclinations.  Some people and races don't mind being close to each other; others value physical personal space that they'll feel threatened if you stay close to them.  That's one of the reasons why some of us don't ride the LRT/MRT - we don't want to be squeezed.  Funny but the same people might not actually mind being squeezed more in the subways of Tokyo, where a friend once told me if you drop a book in transit, it won't fall to the floor but will stay in between passengers!

It's the difference between transport modes that matters.  A person might need, say, 1 square meter while standing still.  But once he/she starts walking, you need an extra square meter to move around.  The buffer, as everyone would probably know, is needed just in case the person you're following suddenly stops.  This is true in all kinds of transport, be it a bicycle, a car, a bus, or the LRT/MRT train.  That's why you see all those “Keep Distance” signs in many of our public utility buses.  The faster your speed, the wider the distance required.

A bicycle might need one-and-a-half sq. meters while parked, but it will need around 4.5 sq. m. while you're riding on it at 15 kilometers per hour.  A car might only be 4.5 sq. m. in size but definitely, you can't park it in an area that small - you need something like 10 sq. m. of parking space or more.  Some people could not even park in that kind of space, or will take a number of minutes to do so, with the same number of curses directed to the parking lot owner.  A bus will require much more, say something 1.5 times or twice its size.

When running, persons, and vehicles need much more road space, depending on the speed.  A car running at 50 kph might require 140 sq. m. of road space, while one speeding at 100 kph may need 450 sq. m. of road space.  The extra space needed for tailing distance, however, would not differ much in the case of a bus, as all of us who have driver's licenses would know, especially those notorious for tailgating.  But since the bus carries much more passengers than the maximum of 4, average of 1.5, for the car, the road space requirement for one single bus passenger is less than 10 sq. meters!

Enrique Peñalosa would ask you, “if a disaster would hit Cebu and you would only have enough fuel for 5 percent of the total number of vehicles, the roads clogged up, and you need to move thousands of people to hospitals or safer areas, to whom will you give the fuel?” To the buses of course!  It is more efficient in using road space, not to mention fuel, in transporting as many passengers as possible.  I was wondering, isn't a traffic jam or gridlock a disaster of some sort?  Congestion is simply an acute lack of road space, and if we can't add any to the one we already have, we might as well utilize it to the fullest - by using public transportation.

That's not even ideological.  Here goes - 70-80 percent of our commuters ride public transportation and they use 20-30 percent of the road space.  When the going gets rough, what do we do?  Penalize them by banning buses from our streets?  Make it hard on the poor so that the car driving rich can have a leisurely drive to work?  How undemocratic can we get?