Ruffy Magbanua
WE would like to address this concern to all who may able to read this column: Is Cagayan de Oro not having a traffic problem all these years?
If your answer is a resounding NO, then the recent findings that only three major cities in the country suffer from traffic crisis are absolutely not true.
This city of 1.3 million people is growing by leaps and bounds, no doubt about it, but not without traffic woes.
Then by all means, we have to cry foul on that wrong premise and inform the House committee on transportation chaired by Catanduanes Rep. Cesar Sarmiento to include Cagayan de Oro in the list of traffic-hit cities to be covered by the proposed emergency powers.
To prove that, we might as well invite Sarmiento and his committee to come to Cagayan de Oro and see for themselves the worsening traffic situation here.
Last Monday’s committee hearing on granting emergency powers to the Duterte administration to solve traffic woes has identified Metro Manila, Cebu and Davao as the only cities suffering from traffic crisis in the country today.
The committee has excluded Cagayan de Oro in the list, saying the traffic crisis was only confined to the three mentioned major urban centers.
Cagay-anons and people who come to Cagayan de Oro have only one thing to say about our city: traffic is at its worst, and likened to the current political mess at City Hall.
With so much politics being played and spread all over like wildfire, it appears that we are going down the drain, both politically and morally.
Unfortunately, we have local leaders who are still hanging on to their power despite a web of cases filed against them--all these at the taxpayers’ expense.
Now, we don’t care whether the committee was not satisfied with the report of the Department of Transporation to define the scope of the traffic crisis in the country.
What concerns us, Cagay-anons, are the apparent display of confusion of the transportation department on its incomplete project proposal of granting emergency powers as requested by President Duterte.
What makes us worry was the manner the negative report of the committee, it being focused only to its findings in the three major cities, not knowing pretty well that Cagayan de Oro has even a bigger traffic problem than Davao City.
My good friend, Atty. Egay Uy, the city’s traffic czar, would perhaps consider the findings of the committee unfair and biased, notwithstanding the magnitude of Cagayan de Oro’s traffic crisis that is equally that of Cebu’s or even far more bigger than Davao’s.
Everywhere you go, traffic in Cagayan de Oro known far and wide as the City of Golden Friendship is not at all friendly to motorists and pedestrians alike.
A billionaire city, Cagayan de Oro has its streets unlighted, its traffic lights not working, and worse, narrow city streets are clogged with so many four-wheeled vehicles in various sizes illegally parked on both sides of the road.
The diminutive trisikads and motorelas ply through major thoroughfares, even in national highways like in Barangay Bugo and other congested areas of the city.
This is Cagayan de Oro today, on the way up to becoming a metropolis but not without having traffic problems like the rest of the urban centers identified by the House committee.
We would like to call the attention of the chair of the House committee on transportation, Congressman Sarmiento, and ask: Is our city not in a traffic mess?
E-mail: ruffy44_ph2000@yahoo.com
