‘CARS ARE THE PROBLEM’IS NOT FAKE NEWS, IT’S REALITY

THE ambitious transport modernization plan that the Department of Transportation ( DOTr) started a few months back was written in memo form and was quite legal and technical. But one can’t miss the reason why the DOTr came out with the memo. The problem is clear, it said. Private vehicles (cars) have overrun the urban roads and no amount of infrastructure buildup could catch up with the pace of car-buying and use.

Some 300,000 cars are acquired yearly, from the delata bantam cars of the wage earners to the pricey SUVs of the powerful and the wealthy. Intended for the metropolis that last tasted a burst of infra building in the 1990s and is awfully lacking in public infrastructure. Mr. Duterte is right. Metro Manila is a dying city and its choked roads are the number one reason for the paralysis.

The solution, according to the DOTr memo: modernize public transport to curb the enthusiasm for cars, to lure people into taking the various modes of public transport: buses, mini- buses, AUV vans, jeepneys, whatever. If there was a phrase apt enough to summarize the DOTr memo it was this: Make people leave their cars in the garage and take public transport. In other words, incentivize people through a modern transport system that is

That memo was probably the first official recognition by the DU30 administration that cars, not the PUVs, are at the root of the metropolitan centers. Previous references to the problem of cars had been verbal and tongue-in-cheek.

The decision to resurrect the yellow lanes for buses along EDSA provides the optic that supports the “cars- are- the- problem“take of the DOTr. Along EDSA, day in and day out, people can now view the stark reality—the yellow lanes move fast and the lanes outside are choked to kingdom come. That yellow-lane part of EDSA validates the DOTr memo that once there is a great shift to PUVs, the traf roads will be history.

Even the self-serving study commissioned by the TNV operator Uber said that only 65 percent of the cars on the road are needed. The 35 percent are there because car use is unregulated and ours is a car-crazy nation. The study said that an urban resident spends more than 400 hours a year stuck in the hellish metropolitan roads.

So, why is there no action being taken to purge the 35 percent off the jammed metropolitan roads and regulate the use of the 65 percent? It is all too clear that cars are the prob- lem. Our is a country that is used to passing, swiftly and with urgency, laws that regulate. During the 2016 campaign period, then candidate - ing those cars” was the solution to

Why? Why indeed? Why is policy afraid to deal with the car problem and muster the political will to rein in their use?

First, this is a car-crazy country. This is a people that would rather live in a cheap rental but with cars parked along roads and public spaces than live in a paid-for dwelling but carless. That is, by any benchmark, a twisted priority but it is the vote most Filipinos make, if asked to pick between a paid- for- house without cars a rental with cars. That the subscribers to this theory belong to the two most productive sectors think twice before imposing reg-