The problem: Traffic congestion (chaos, really). The solution: Bridges and Diversion Roads.
Now that seems to express the problem and the solutions in very simple and easy terms. Dumaguete City, from what I’ve been reading, could have seven bridges total very soon. Couple that with the completion of the Diversion Road, and traffic should flow like greased lightning, right?
If that’s what you think, how simple could your mind be?
It’s still not too hard to remember when there were no bridges close to the BIR on Agapito Valencia Drive and Colon Street Extension, behind Foundation University. At that time, as now, the traffic conditions were terrible, and everyone anticipated the completion of those two bridges like kids promised their choice of toys.
With the completion of the bridges, City traffic will be greatly eased, and travel times should improve, commensurate to the short distances Dumaguete City actually has. That’s what they (the City government) said. People were even impatient, ranting ceaselessly that it was taking the construction companies forever to finish the projects.
Well, those two bridges were finally completed and opened to the public. Instead of sharing what I observed the traffic to be after their completion, let me ask you, according to your own observations and experience, to quantify how much of the traffic problem you think those bridges have helped to alleviate throughout the entire breadth of the City. Or do you even feel a difference now?
I take the route through the BIR bridge almost every single day. Of course, as before there are times during the day when traffic is light. But it was like that before the bridge!
The real test is during peak hours when, surprisingly, it seems much worse than before there was a bridge, especially in the late afternoons coming from Bagacay going to Batinguel and downtown Dumaguete, or north toward Sibulan.
That road coming from the bridge, Agapito Valencia Drive, comes to a bottleneck at its intersection with the Dumaguete/Palinpinon Road. The pace of traffic there at peak hours redefines the expression bumper-to-bumper. It’ll be faster to walk your pet turtle, if you had one, promise!
And having the Colon Street Extension bridge, roughly half a kilometer downstream on the Banica river, or about the length of one-and-half aircraft carriers end-to-end, does nothing to alleviate the peak hour traffic at the Agapito Valencia Drive bridge. It’s as if one bridge tells the other, “Hey man, I’ve got my own problems here!”
So if the two bridges and the Diversion Road, so far, have not solved the traffic problem, then there must be other reasons that help it persist. If you think that, you cannot, just cannot, be wrong! You could be thinking every day of solutions to the traffic problem, and may even run out of ideas eventually, and the problem will still exist.
Now, why would that be? I guess because smooth-flowing traffic is not all about bridges and roads! It’s also about management and enforcement of the laws, especially in a City with a wildly growing population.
I am confident that people (including LGU Dumaguete) will agree about the management aspect because the City has a Traffic Management Office after all. But is that office about managing the traffic in the City? And as far as the enforcement of the laws, well, there’s also the Executive, right? (Smiley face here!)
That there is something wrong with the traffic in Dumaguete, besides the lack of roads and bridges, is all too evident if you are a driver there. Just take a drive during the hours that people are working, going to school, or attending to their businesses, and you will immediately see the extremely disorderly traffic.
And please do not be proud to call it controlled chaos because if control is lost, even for a moment, it will turn into unmitigated disaster.
There are so many vehicles that shouldn’t be on the roads of Dumaguete just because their drivers have no licenses nor are they registered. But they are, because the laws are not enforced. These unlicensed drivers and unregistered vehicles are sprouting like weeds to the point that authorities are so overwhelmed as to be effective anymore.
Plus, they really lack practice in the enforcement of the traffic laws so they do not know what to do anymore.
To experiment, pick a law to violate in front of them, and you’ll find out that they won’t even know you’ve committed one! Well, maybe except stopping where you’re not supposed to. For some reason, they know that.
If there is any one group of drivers who do not follow even the most fundamental of traffic laws, like signaling, for instance, it would be the pedicab drivers. They wouldn’t even think twice to violate such impoundable offenses as not having taillights, signal lights, or even headlights!
How do they get away with these violations? No enforcement! And why? Well, even if the enforcement personnel see these violations, they may not know that they are violations or they may have been instructed not to worry too much about such “minor” violations. The unsaid rationale could be that they are voters—just one of those things that are given a political tinge.
The busiest city streets are still plagued with the nuisance of big cargo trucks transporting cargo between the pier and warehouses located across the City. These are mostly warehouses owned by businesses that go way back to the time when Dumaguete had about a tenth of the population it has now.
It would be hard for the City, without stern political will, to tell these same businesses that their trucks have to utilize the Diversion Roads, and arrive at their warehouses from the other side of town. Boy, they would have a fit if told that, and the powers-that-be are just too afraid of that.
However, even if the Dumaguete government continues to allow those big trucks to transit through the chaotic traffic of this small town, there are yet other things that it can do to comb the City’s traffic situation.
For instance, they could consistently pursue unregistered vehicles and apprehend unlicensed drivers, to start with. Then they could vigorously enforce the traffic laws and identify, apprehend, and fine moving violations, which there are plenty of.
Don’t they realize that besides helping discipline drivers, these actions could also earn revenue for the City? Or could it be that these ideas are too unimportant compared to maintaining a voter base?
While it is nice to have bridges all over the place (for convenience), it would also be nice if the traffic is managed so that the bridges and Diversion Roads could live up to their true potential of helping smooth out and improve traffic flow in Dumaguete City.
In the evenings, sugar cane trucks from the south going to the mills in the north go through the City, and get away with it because there are no traffic enforcers at night. The TMO closes shop at sundown. That is just one of the things the City government has to look at if it is serious about solving problems related to traffic.
Building bridges because there’s money to build them, and because it seems to add avenues for motorists may not be the best solution to the traffic problem, even if it sounds really good. It may be overreaching to solve a problem whose solution may have already been found but not implemented well.
With the way it is now, the traffic in Dumaguete City is as bad as it has always been because there is no enforcement of the existing traffic laws; there is no deterrent for erring and undisciplined drivers; and the concern of the administration only goes as far as rhetoric.
And if the administration will continue to have its way, the last bridge to be built may just be a bridge too far!
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Author’s email: [email protected]
