Road space: for whom?

Last Sunday, we talked about "Road Density - the space requirements for roads," in this column.  Then this week, a Philippine Daily Inquirer headline blared, "Give us back our roads," as our friend and fellow Cebuano, Atty. Tony Oposa and company, fed up with traffic jams, air and noise pollution, filed a petition in the Supreme Court.  I don't exactly agree 100% with the details of the petition, but I support wholeheartedly this initiative.  This should bring to the forefront the long-pending debate on the undemocratic use of our roads.

When we start asking, "Give us back our road," it presupposes the fact that we own the road in the first place.  Not too difficult to prove since roads, especially the public ones, are truly owned by everybody since these are paid for by people's taxes.  But public ownership also does not bestow specific ownership to any one person, group, or sector.  No one can claim ownership of any public resource to the exclusion of others.  Public ownership also does not warrant unlimited access to any common resource.  Malacañang Palace is a public building, owned by the people, but this does not give everyone the right to enter it whenever they want to.  Same as jails or any other public buildings.

So when we start asking the government, "give us back our roads," it doesn't mean we go to the motions of cutting up or subdividing the road area and giving the small pieces to each and every Filipino.  Certainly that is impossible to do and it defeats the purpose to which the roads were built in the first place.  What the petitioners mean is that road space should be used to  serve the greater numbers of people and not just for a select few.  We have discussed this for some time when we wrote about "Democratizing Transportation" in September 2012.  The greatest good to the greatest number.  That is the essence of democracy.

But sometimes we mix up public ownership with private ownership.  Public ownership of Malacañang does not mean all of us has a piece of it or can enter it anytime.  It means the palace should be used for the function it is intended for, for the benefit of the people.  It's the same as roads, highways, and other land transport infrastructure.  These should be used for their intended functions for the greater good of everybody.  The key phrase here is, "Not for a Select Few."  This is where a good understanding of the functions, use, and intended purposes, of public resources plays a very important role.

One of the less-understood dichotomies in urban development is simply the differentiation of roads and streets.  In our column last January 2012, entitled, "Cities of the world - Roads or Streets?," we quote Wikipedia which thus stated, "a road's main function is transportation, while streets facilitate public interaction.  Examples of streets include pedestrian streets, alleys, and city-centre streets too crowded for road vehicles to pass.  Conversely, highways and motorways are types of roads, but few would refer to them as streets."  This differentiation is actually fairly recent, history-wise.  Roads for exclusive use of transportation began only in the last century, when motor vehicles, particularly cars, appeared.  For centuries and millennia before that, roads and streets and other passageways and carriageways were built mainly for people and communities.

The very essence of democracy is equality for all, hinged on an ideology that promoted the greatest good for the greatest number.  Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address advanced the notion of "a government of the people, by the people, and for the people," which means that no person, group, or sector, should benefit from a common resource, to the disadvantage of the rest.  In the current petition, the High Court must ensure that their decision over the demand of returning "our" roads to "us" will not disenfranchise millions of other road users, groups, or sectors.

That's why when we play around with the term, "road space," we have to go back to basic arithmetic and transport economics to determine really what road area do we need or use, how do we allocate road space to provide for "the greatest good to the greatest number," and how does this allocation with the costs of each transport mode in order to arrive at the optimum economic return.  One cannot just say, "I want this," or "I need this" without looking at how this affects other road users, most especially the poor.  The principle that "those who have less in wheels must have more in the road," is the best guide in road space allocation, and we should be careful when we thus rationalize how to allocate space, we are really upholding the said principle instead of perpetuating the undemocratic use of road space.  Definitely, it will not come to the 50-50 sharing as proposed.  But as what I said, this should be a good start for discussion and debate, hopefully evolving into an environmentally-sustainable transport system in the country. (to be continued).