Another crazy idea from Mayor Osmeña!

I could only read and chuckle at another cockamamie proposal coming out of the brains of Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña to limit the heights of buildings because anything higher than eight stories would prevent the Bureau of Fire Protection (BFP) from saving or rescuing you. Thank goodness that Tomas Osmeña was never mayor of New York City; otherwise, we could never have seen the Empire State Building or the World Trade Center. If he had it his way, there would be no Burj Khalifa in Dubai or even the Sky Tree Tower in Tokyo.

I really don't know what's going inside the mind of Mayor Osmeña; perhaps, he was awed by the arrival of the fire ladder trucks assigned to the BFP-7. Perhaps, he already forgot that when we first got those Kaohsiung buses, one of the equipment that the City of Kaohsiung was giving to Cebu City was a 20-ton fire ladder truck made in Florida, USA. While the Chinese officials were busy discussing how that ladder truck would be of great use to Cebu (at that time, the tallest building in Cebu was the Metro Bank Building aside from the Cebu Plaza Hotel), my good friend, the late Sammy Darza who was with us, whispered into my ear saying, "Look at the weight of this ladder truck. It's 20 tons. This means when it passes the bridges of Cebu City, they would all collapse as those bridges were designed only for 10 tons." In the end, we never requested to have the ladder truck sent to Cebu.

But for the record, Cebu City now has many buildings taller than 10 stories. In today's building design, anything above 10 stories need a water pipe (standpipes) to bring pressurized water all the way up to the highest floor of the building. All our firefighters need to do is to attach their fire hoses into the outlets of these water pipes. It is a fact that most of the firefighters who perished during the collapse of the World Trade Center died as they were climbing up or down the stairwells in an effort to put up the fire during the 9/11 debacle.

In short, we do not need a mayor to warn people not to invest in a condominium building just because it is too high. Tall buildings have their own unique attraction, and we shouldn't expect our political leaders to set limits on building heights simply because the equipment of our fire department cannot reach those heights. It is just preposterous!

*** Finally, Mandaue City Mayor Gabriel Luis "Luigi" Quisumbing has embarked on a traffic scheme aimed at solving the mad traffic along the United Nations (UN) Avenue. The entire stretch of UN Ave. has been declared as a "No Stopping" zone. Motorists are not allowed to stop except on two designated loading and unloading zones, and they will only be for PUJs. This is what they should have done in the last six years-doing traffic experiments, finding out what works, or what doesn't work. The logic here is simple; lesser stops mean fewer blockages on the road and this should translate to smoother traffic.

Perhaps the most important reminder for all is to ask yourself, whether you are creating a problem when you cross the Mactan Channel. Whenever I got to Manila and my flight plans are within the operating time of SM's My Bus, I have decided not to have my kids fetch or bring me to the Mactan-Cebu International Airport (MCIA); rather, they would drop me off at SM's My Bus station, so I can take the bus to the airport. Doing so means, lesser fuel cost for me.

At this point, I hope that this experiment will work. But I still say that building flyovers along the congested intersections is the solution to the traffic problem in that area. Of course the eventual construction of the third bridge to cross the Mactan Channel is the ideal solution. But then this project is still at least 10 years away. We must find innovative ways to help decongest traffic now. Perhaps the companies or locators at the Mactan Export Processing Zone (MEPZ I & II) should conduct survey of their employees to help identify who works and lives within Mactan and those that need to cross the Mactan Channel. Identifying who these people are will certainly result in finding solutions to this problem.

A case in point is the Magsaysay Ferry that plies between Cebu City and Muelle Osmeña. For sure that lifeline to Mactan is a great help in decongesting the mad traffic in the two bridges. These maybe band-aid solutions to the traffic congestion these days, but these little things count and could add up. What pains me is when traffic bodies do not do anything to help ease traffic congestion and that's what 6 years of doing nothing has done for us in Cebu. For instance, we still have no idea on how to solve the traffic problems along Escario Street.