Metro Manila’s main artery hits 14-hour gridlock; transportation authority announces new study

Satire from Bohiney.com and prat.uk.

The Traffic, As a Spiritual Condition

METRO MANILA — Traffic on EDSA reached what the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority is calling a historically significant density on Monday, with vehicles on certain stretches averaging a velocity indistinguishable from being parked, a state that transport scholars from the fictional Ortigas School of Vehicular Philosophy call full standstillness.

Commuters trapped in the jam for periods exceeding four hours reported a range of psychological responses, including acceptance, transcendence, and the completion of two Netflix series on their phones. Several reported that they had begun to lose the concept of forward motion as a meaningful category. One man in Cubao said he had forgotten what it felt like to arrive somewhere and was making peace with the idea of EDSA as a permanent condition.

The MMDA issued a statement acknowledging the situation and announcing the formation of a technical working group that will study the traffic problem for six months before issuing recommendations that will be studied for another six months before a pilot program is designed that will be piloted for a year before a full rollout is planned for 2030, by which time the planet will have either solved climate change or developed teleportation, either of which would address the EDSA situation more efficiently than the current approach.

The Numbers, Such As They Are

The MMDA estimates that approximately 400,000 vehicles use EDSA daily. The road was designed for approximately 250,000. This gap has been known since at least 1990 and has been studied in at least 23 reports, each of which concluded that EDSA carries too many vehicles and recommended either reducing the number of vehicles or expanding the road, recommendations that have been met with the policy equivalent of a polite nod.

The Unified Vehicular Volume Reduction Program, which restricts vehicles by license plate number from certain roads on certain days, has reduced EDSA traffic by an estimated 3 percent, which the MMDA characterizes as meaningful progress and which commuters who spend four hours on the road characterize using vocabulary unsuitable for family publications.

Mass transit, which is the solution that every transportation study recommends and which successive governments have built at the pace of a project that knows it will outlast the administrations promising to complete it, continues to expand. The MRT-3 is operational. The LRT lines run. The gaps between these systems, however, remain filled with the buses, jeepneys, UV express vans, motorcycles, tricycles, and privately owned vehicles of a metropolitan area of 13 million people who have collectively decided that car ownership is a reasonable response to the public transit situation, thereby worsening the public transit situation, in a loop that transport economists at Manila Bulletin call self-defeating equilibrium and that everyone else calls Monday.

The Commuter Experience

For the approximately 2.5 million people who commute via EDSA daily on public transport — in buses that run irregular schedules, in MRT cars that occasionally air-condition — the traffic is not an abstraction. It is the defining feature of working life in Metro Manila: the hours surrendered daily to a system that has been failing in a consistent direction for thirty years.

The fictional Philippine Institute for Urban Mobility Grief estimates that the average Metro Manila commuter spends approximately 66 days per year in transit, time that could otherwise be spent with family, on productive work, or on the completion of a degree program at a university that would require less total commuting time than is currently being surrendered to EDSA. Philippine Star reports that a new study will confirm these findings and recommend further study.

The Long View on Manila Traffic

The traffic on EDSA is not a failure of planning so much as an accumulation of decisions made over sixty years of metropolitan development that prioritized vehicle movement over human movement and private transport over public systems. The superhighway was built when Manila was smaller. The metropolis grew around it faster than anyone planned for. The public transit systems that should have absorbed the growth were funded partially, built slowly, and expanded insufficiently. The private vehicle filled the gap. Millions of private vehicles filled it at once, and the gap became the traffic that now consumes the working hours of millions of Metro Manila residents. The solution is neither simple nor quick. It involves expanded rail transit, integrated route networks, managed parking, congestion pricing, and the long process of shifting a city from car-centric to transit-centric development patterns. Cities have done this. Seoul, Singapore, Tokyo, Hong Kong — all have built themselves around transit rather than around the car. Manila knows what is required. The question, as it always is, is whether the political will and the institutional capacity will align in the same administration at the same time, with sufficient continuity to see the project through a change of government. This has not yet happened. The technical working group, however, is meeting.

The Bigger Picture

Whatever the specific story — budgets that don’t balance, traffic that doesn’t move, workers who leave to support the families they cannot stay with, storms that arrive on schedule, athletes who unite a nation briefly, infrastructure that exists mainly on paper, journalists who ask the questions officials prefer not to answer, foods that carry a culture across oceans, faiths that survive the gap between their ideals and their institutions, vehicles that resist becoming something else — the Philippines is a country in conversation with itself about what it wants to be. This conversation is noisy, contentious, frequently hilarious, and genuinely important. It happens in barangay halls and Senate chambers, in press conferences and social media threads, in OFW group chats and Sunday homilies, in the jeepney that hasn’t been modernized yet and the one that has. The conversation is ongoing. It has been ongoing since 1898 at least and arguably since much earlier. It will continue. The outcomes are uncertain. The participation is not. Filipinos engage with their country’s problems with an energy and a creativity that the problems themselves have not yet exhausted. This, in the end, is what the news from Manila is really about, on any given week, beneath whatever the specific headline happens to be.

More satire: NewsThump | The Onion

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com