Mass transit probably won’t solve traffic woes
Credit to Author: BEN KRITZ, TMT| Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2019 16:16:57 +0000
A friend of mine making the long trek from Manila to my house in Bulacan over the weekend made an interesting observation while mired in Saturday evening traffic along Commonwealth Avenue: The new MRT-7 line under construction along that busy thoroughfare occupies fully a third of the width of the road. Even when the construction project is completed, she suggested, traffic along Commonwealth is going to be just as bad as it is now if not worse, simply because there will be less road.
The construction of the new rail line has constricted traffic from North Avenue all the way up to Commonwealth to the Quirino Highway in Novaliches, Quezon City, and from there northward nearly as far as the boundary between North Caloocan and Bulacan. The congestion due to the construction work is frustrating at times – a trip from San Jose Del Monte to Cubao during weekday rush hour takes roughly three hours, sometimes more – but seems understandable, until one realizes that once the construction ends, the departure of the equipment and removal of the barricades are not going to return the affected roads to their pre-construction state. There will indeed be less road, which means that the current congestion should be considered the norm.
This probably comes as a surprise to advocates of infrastructure investment, but the reality is very few if any of the transportation-related infrastructure projects currently underway or likely to start construction within the next three years are going to make any sort of dent in Metro Manila’s punishing traffic congestion. This does not mean that the projects being built or planned are unnecessary or do not represent progress. They are necessary and do represent progress, because the means to allow people to move around more efficiently are critically needed. But selling them as solutions to traffic congestion is disingenuous.
Human nature, particularly the human nature of the modern, consumption-minded Filipino, explains this easy enough. Despite the fact, or perhaps because of it, that only about 30 percent of Filipinos own or have regular use of a private vehicle, car ownership is an aggressive aspiration; owning a vehicle separates one from the perspiring masses. People who own cars will drive them, and except for an unusually thoughtful few, no amount of safe, fast, convenient public transportation options will encourage them not to. Public transportation is for people who have no choice.
The plus side of the development of new transit options is that people whose pathetic car-less existence obliges them to use public transportation will have better choices, but the mild stigma will not go away. Ridership of new rail lines, new point-to-point or bus rapid transit systems may increase, but it will never increase by way of encouraging drivers to leave their cars behind. Not unless private car ownership is made so difficult and expensive that only the very determined or the very wealthy will persist in it.
That notion, of course, is highly toxic; the automotive business represents a substantial value chain in the Philippine economy, and is considered almost inviolate. Traffic reduction schemes are directed more often toward public transportation vehicles like jeepneys and buses or commercial vehicles than they are towards private automobiles, and when the latter is affected, the regulation is carefully calibrated to not completely discourage car ownership. A good example is the thoroughly unpopular “number coding” scheme: Drivers are prevented from using their cars during daylight hours on one day out of seven, and are not prevented from owning two or more vehicles to ensure that they have a vehicle to drive every day.
Conventional wisdom, or what passes for it here, assumes that traffic congestion solutions must be developed that do not restrict the automotive market. After years of tap-dancing around the problem, planners should finally recognize that the two objectives are incompatible: You cannot simultaneously reduce traffic congestion while encouraging the growth of the automotive industry. To reduce traffic congestion, reduce the number of private vehicles, and prevent the population of private vehicles from growing at a rate that exceeds the expansion of road capacity.
Doing that would indeed kill the largest part of the local automotive industry, but all that really means is that if the country wishes to maintain the same level of industrialization, it will need to find a substitute. That might be a daunting challenge; replacing once-useful but clearly outmoded concepts – labor export and jeepneys are the best-known examples – is not something the Philippines is good at. It can be done, however, and it ought to be: No problem was ever completely solved by addressing a completely different problem; those who have struggled unsuccessfully for years to bring traffic congestion under control should realize that by now.
Email: ben.kritz@manilatimes.net
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