Congestion crushing the life out of the country
Credit to Author: Ben Kritz| Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2019 16:16:13 +0000
ACCORDING to the news over the weekend, Malacañang is “studying” the latest genius non-solution to “solve” the traffic crisis, the implementation of a voluntary four-day workweek for the balance of the holiday season for non-critical government personnel and the private sector. The idea has some merit in a general sense, but in terms of its specific objective and timing is a pants-on-head level of stupid, just as most other “solutions” that have been proposed or tried.
The timing alone makes the idea completely irrelevant. It is now November 19; there are only 45 days left in the holiday season (until January 2, 2020). By the time Malacañang “studies” the issue, hands it off to the concerned agencies, and the means to implement it is devised, weeks will pass. At best, the process will take weeks; as a rule of thumb (this is an observation made by officials of the Department of Finance, among others), implementation of any government policy generally takes about two months under ideal circumstances.
And as most ideas offered as “solutions” to traffic congestion, the four-day workweek only tangentially addresses the actual problem, if it addresses it at all, which is debatable. As has long been known, about 70 percent of commuter trips in Metro Manila — either within the city, or to and from the border provinces — are made by public transportation, with only about 30 percent made by car. That is in terms of people; if vehicles are used as the metric, the ratio is approximately reversed. Thus, if the entire workforce of Metro Manila was reduced to a four-day workweek, assuming everyone works five days a week now, the maximum traffic reduction would be 20 percent.
As of the latest published statistics (covering January to August 2019), the average daily vehicle volume on Edsa was 405,882, so the best-case scenario under the four-day workweek scheme would reduce that to 324,706 — still 44.3 percent higher than Edsa’s actual capacity of 225,000 vehicles. The actual reduction would be far less; not every private employer and government agency will be able to implement a four-day workweek, so the improvement in congestion, if there actually is any, is likely to be imperceptible.
It would be an imperceptible improvement purchased at an enormous cost to the economy as well. The well-known Japanese study published in 2017 and repeatedly cited since then put the lost productivity cost due to Metro Manila’s congestion at $67 million (about P3.35 billion) per day. If the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA), Department of Transportation, and well-meaning amateur traffic planners in the legislature would bother to talk to actual commuters rather than focus on vehicle-centric hypotheses, they would discover the opportunity cost is much higher than that, because the extreme congestion is forcing people to alter their daily habits, to the detriment of businesses all across the economic spectrum. Implementing another “solution” that curbs business activity — just like that other MMDA brainwave, forcing malls near Edsa to open later — in the vain hope that it will indirectly reduce traffic only aggravates the economic loss.
In defense of the four-day workweek idea, proponents have pointed out that a recent study of the scheme implemented by Microsoft in Japan showed that it correlated to (not necessarily resulted in) a 40-percent increase in productivity for the company. That may be, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with traffic reduction — and whether or not the experience of one single, extremely productive company in one of the most obsessively productive work cultures in the world is a fair gauge of the likely outcome in the Philippines is something most people would probably question.
Addressing the real cause of congestion
It bears repeating — because policymakers evidently have not grasped it yet, despite it being obvious to everyone else — that the only possible solutions to traffic congestion lie in addressing the actual cause of congestion: There are approximately 14 million people in Metro Manila, and in spite of the fact that at nearly 10 million of those people travel by public transportation, there are approximately the same number of vehicles as there are humans. Metro Manila is not congested because there aren’t enough roads or enough rules — it is because there are too many vehicles.
The long-term solution to that, as the current administration has realized and is making an attempt to at least start operationalizing, is to encourage diffusion of business and resources away from Metro Manila, and to make massive improvements in public transportation. Unfortunately, progress is still being diluted by dumb ideas and a lack of performance in other areas. For example, the plan to move some government offices to the new planned city at Clark is a good early step. The plan to build an ostentatious new Senate building smack in the middle of one of the city’s most traffic-plagued neighborhoods, however, is not.
Likewise, progress on the new Metro Rail Transit (MRT)-7 line, the extension of the Light Rail Transit (LRT)-1 line, and the government’s determination to carry out the PUV Modernization Program are all badly needed forward steps to improving public transportation. On the other hand, the apparent fragility of the LRT-2 line, with about a third of the line being put out of action for months due to an electrical fire, and the somnolent, nay, glacial pace of the critically needed rehabilitation of the almost unusable MRT-3 line are significant setbacks.
In the short term, if government planners sincerely cannot divorce themselves from the notion that modifying business activity will somehow affect traffic congestion, then they should at least stop trying to implement restrictions that will only contribute to lost productivity and have been demonstrated failures in the past anyway. Instead, they should consider the opposite tack, which at least on paper supports a stronger argument: Rather than doing things like restricting mall hours and imposing on businesses and public service offices to shorten their work weeks, the government should encourage businesses and government agencies to extend their hours, even to operate round-the-clock if possible.
Residents and workers in Metro Manila have already become adept at adjusting their own schedules to try to avoid congestion, and offering them even greater options to do that would spread activity across the entire 24-hour day. The increased business activity would create more jobs, and likely improve the productivity of existing workers who could benefit from greater flexibility. The scheme would not be a real solution to traffic congestion, but what it would do is dilute the congestion to some degree; in effect, buy some time to allow sustainable long-term fixes to be implemented. Nothing that has been tried so far has done even that much; it is hard to imagine that the situation would become any worse for trying it.
Ben.kritz@manilatimes.net
Twitter: @benkritz