Political will and traffic woes

Cong Corrales .

THE Roads and Traffic Administration appears to have everything but administration. It must be the most inefficient and grossly incompetent department in city hall’s entire bureaucracy. A cursory drive around the streets of the inner city and its highways will bear me out on this claim.

Luxury SUVs are double-parked in already narrow streets. These “untouchable” vehicles, by the way, almost always sport a decal of Herr Führer’s fist bump salute. There is a ridiculous number of traffic lights which seem to be inversely proportional to the number of enforcers manning the intersections. Out along JR Borja Extension and highways, 18-wheeled trucks and even broken down heavy equipment line up as if these were their garages. Last but not the least are construction supply stores and other businesses encroaching the legally mandated one-meter easement as extensions for their warehouse or product display.

I am often baffled where the likes of Mayor Oscar Moreno and City Administrator Teodoro Sabuga-a pass through when going to city hall from their residences. Are the windshields of their cars heavily tinted that they can’t see what ordinary pedestrians and motorists see? I ask this because they seem to be content with the services rendered by the RTA’s guy on the ground.

Appointments to the city’s departments like the RTA need to be based on efficiency and competence. Princeton University’s WordNet database defines efficiency as the ratio of the output to the input of any system and the skillfulness in avoiding wasted time and effort. The same database defines competence as the quality of being well qualified physically and intellectually. You’ll be the judge, my dear readers.

A friend recently shared his observation of the traffic lights of the city to me, last week. He pointed out that intersections with traffic lights are more likely to have gridlocks than those that have no traffic lights. He specifically pointed out the four bottlenecks in Bulua and Kauswagan.

For my part, I find it boggling that traffic enforcers are quick to launch “karate operations” against ambulant vendors and even deploy towing trucks for the same when luxury SUVs and trucks obstruct roads and inner streets far wider than ambulant vendors. Mga kabus ra’y kaya, ser?

The two-lane barangay roads have become even narrower because of residents using it as their garage extensions. Worse are the “bays” for automotive repair shops. In Consolacion, dump trucks park overnight right beside the streets. Where are RTA’s towing trucks? Where are their clamps? I distinctively remember they had these when they sampled illegally parked cars in downtown Divisoria way back when they launched “Hapsay Dalan?”

I must have called the attention of authorities a gazillion times. Yes, the RTA visits and inspects the area but other than that, nothing actually happens. In the weeks that followed, the dump truck just stayed there. In fact, it is still here, as I write this column. We have even started calling it a “dumb truck” for the obstinance of its owner.

The pièce de résistance of this seeming double standard, for me, is one construction supply store in front of this paper’s office in Gusa. I have been told the owner of the store is a village chief in one of the city’s urban barangays. It is also public knowledge that he is closely associated with the city’s erstwhile kingpin. We have referred to this store owner as the “reclamation king” in jest. This is the very same person who single-handedly delayed a national civil works project: the coastal road.

Year in and year out, he has effectively “reclaimed” the highway as an extension of, not only parking space for delivery trucks, his warehouse. Just recently, he used the drainage of the highway as a storage area for his iron bars.

Oh, the area also serves as a parking space for his forklift, which conveniently wasn’t present when the RTA made a surprise inspection last month. But after that surprise inspection, pfft. (Cue in cricket sounds here.)

Mind you, people are not as naive as these powerful cretins might presume. People know how to connect the dots and cross the Ts when it comes to political will and considerations. Not until these cretins learn who they are supposed to be serving, the city’s traffic woes will continue to plague us pedestrians and motorists alike. Pfft.