Haphazard response
The latest from the Mambaling traffic side is Cebu City Hall’s announcement that it would open to traffic the road near the “closed” Inayawan dumpsite that connects to the South Road Properties (SRP). The hope is that this would ease congestion in the portion of Natalio Bacalso Ave. where the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) is constructing the ballyhooed underpass.
This follows the recent “miracle” that had the parish priest of the Archdiocesan Shrine of the Lady of Lourdes allowing some vehicles to use the church road for detour and ease traffic near the underpass construction site.
While the opening of a new access road using the Inayawan to the SRP route is a welcome move, it also showed how haphazard is the City’s effort to solve the traffic problem caused by the underpass construction. This has become a what-ever-comes-to-mind thing instead of a well-planned one, although one shouldn’t be surprised because the same process happened with the start of the underpass work.
One wonders, then, how competent are the people mapping out the efforts to ease the traffic woes of motorists going to and from the south, and whether the city’s traffic managers met to lay down a better plan when the problem surfaced a few weeks ago. If they did, we would not have been hearing these piecemeal announcements and they would have not waited for the offer made by the Lady of Lourdes parish priest.
The contractor and the DPWH are constructing the underpass in phases. They had the work outlined from start to finish. Mayor Tomas Osmeña and the city’s traffic managers must have been told about it by DPWH and the contractor and could have anticipated the effect of the implementation of each phase to the surrounding vehicular traffic.
Okay, the city’s traffic managers ended up being unprepared when the underpass construction started until that phase when F. Llamas St. was affected. But they could have learned from that failure and come up with a comprehensive rerouting plan when the traffic situation worsened. Again, they didn’t, apparently. So couldn’t they sit, this time around, and be more comprehensive and anticipatory in their next approach?