A society that depends on cars

We have been writing a lot on the problems of urban transportation, especially on matters which affect our cities in the Philippines.  One of the better ways of understanding the issues is actually to look at the rest of the world, how they fare in different countries and how many of the experiences are actually similar to ours and many are so different we can hardly recognize them.  If we look only on our own situation, we will be constrained within the narrow spectrum of our past collective national experience, and miss the solutions others perfected.

As we have always asserted in the past year, urban transportation cannot be dissociated from urban land use and city planning as a whole.  How a city is planned will define its transport system, and conversely, the lay-out of the transport network defines urban design.  This might be a chicken-and-egg paradigm, but that is a truism that we have to accept - no one can say which came first, the chicken or the egg, and in the case of land use and transport, both have to be planned together, no need to conclude which come first.

The peculiar situation in the Philippines is that we are, by and large, mostly a replication of many things American in nature, including our affiliation to cars.  We are still far off from being a car-centric society that they are, our present motorization rate is less than a hundred motor vehicles per 1,000 population.  The US is already at a level of 800 per thousand population, the third highest in the world, exceeded only by Monaco and San Marino, the latter an enclave microstate in Italy.  But the way our society collective thinks, we're following the US.

An incident 2 weeks ago gave me a taste of how car-centric the US is.  After the registering at the Las Vegas Convention Center for the World Routes conference, we decided to have lunch at one of the In-N-Out Burger outlets in Las Vegas.  I am not really crazy for hamburgers and french fries, as you may have already noticed, but, well, it's a popular chain, and I thought you have to try it sometime, and that time was as good as any.  We went by taxi, knowing no other means of travelling there.  As usual, we couldn't even finish half of the french fries.

I had to hurry to another meeting with the DOT afterwards, so we tried to flag down another taxi after the meal, but strangely, there were very few which passed by, mostly already with passengers, and the ones which were empty, didn't stop to take us.  We looked for a bus station, but the one we went to was empty and no bus passed by for half an hour.  We crossed the road, and eventually got into the first bus that passed by.  Eventually, I arrived late for the meeting, after two transfers - three bus rides in all, in a circuitous route.

Much later, we were told, taxis don't take fare on the road; you have to call to get on one.  I thought why would a burger joint place itself on a part of the city where there is no access by public transportation and where taxis could not even pick up passengers?  The reason dawned on me - because almost everybody have cars; people in the US have cars, it's as if you can't live without a car.  In a city which main attraction is gaming, entertainment, and tourism like Las Vegas, only visitors don't have cars.  But you can always rent one.

That Americans have cars is an understatement.  One thing which surprised me, though, is the presence of beggars even in the The Strip, the classy, glittering high-rise part of the city.  They sit on the sidewalks and the pedestrian overpasses, just like the poor people we have in this country.  There are some differences though - quite a few dishevelled people put out signs on cardboard which says, "Have pity - need gas to go home ..."  I read again just to make sure I read it right.  These guys were begging for gas!  They're down to the last cent, begging on the road, but they have cars!  Imagine anybody in the Philippines begging for gas.

And you can go on and on.  Many of us have relatives in the US - you can ask yours and they will tell you, anybody in the family, for as long as they can get a driver's licence, has and use a car.  I'm generalizing, of course, but 800 per 1,000 means 8 out of 10 Americans own a motor vehicle, in contrast to less than 1 out of 10 Filipinos.  No wonder there are not really good examples of public transportation over there.  The ones in Hong Kong and Singapore, most of Latin America and many in China, are better examples.  I hope we in the Philippines know which countries, cities, and societies are better to follow. 

(To be continued)