RAQUID, FRANCES LYN N.

BS ARCH 4-3

The Real Problem No One Is Admitting

Since time immemorial, the extensive traffic problem in metro manila has become worse and
worse as years pass by. The slow acceleration of cars, buses and jeeps, the long lanes of different kind
of vehicles, non-stop honking of horns, excessive discharge of exhaust smoke and the blinding flashes
of headlight and tail lights. This kind of sight has become normal and at the same time, bothersome
to all the commuters and car-owners in the city. Believe it or not, the government had passed plenty
of laws and rules and regulations to alleviate the prevailing dilemma in the city and continue to think
solutions to this economy-dying problem. But why is that until now, nothing has changed? Are those
laws were just band-aid solutions? Let us scrutinize some basic ones with their advantage and
disadvantages.

Regulated Public Terminals - bus schemes, designated loading and unloading zones, public terminals.
These are some of the strategies that our government proposed to alleviate the worsening traffic.
They believe that those undisciplined drivers and commuters who unmindfully create traffic jam as
they load and unload is one of the factors why the current situation is not changing. This is true, but
this is not the whole picture.

Plate number coding - thousands of private and public vehicles flock in the highways and streets of
our city everyday. To decrease this astounding number, plate number coding is implemented. In this
system, vehicles that has a plate number that ends in the number that is assigned is prohibited to
travel until a certain time. If your car’s plate number ends in 2, you are not allowed to use your car in
highways and major road on Tuesday until 7pm. But why is that with this simple regulation, traffic is
still present?

Road Widening - The last one for this topic (but there are many of these, just check the internet) is
what the government loves to do everytime. More road networks and road widening. They believe
that widening road and building more road networks will accommodate the everyday volume of the
vehicles. But isn’t just worsening the problem?

In my perspective, no matter how wide are the roads, how you manage the mass
transportation and how you regularize the volume of the cars, the bottomline to this is that buying
cars is very accessible. Anyone, as long as you have the money (even though you do not have a space
to park your car) will be able to buy one. The real problem no one is admitting is that our lawmakers
do not make any rules for the regulation of buying cars. Thus, nothing has changed and this problem
is now becoming a chaos.