Agency Confirms New ‘Revolutionary’ Coding Scheme Will Work This Time Because the PowerPoint Is Different
The Fifteenth Traffic Solution: This One Has a Different Logo
The Metro Manila Development Authority unveiled its latest comprehensive traffic management framework on Monday in a press conference attended by seventeen journalists, four government officials who arrived forty-five minutes late due to traffic, and a PowerPoint presentation containing thirty-eight slides of which the most substantive was slide seven, which showed a map of EDSA with arrows indicating where traffic currently goes and different arrows indicating where traffic should go instead.
‘This is not just another traffic scheme,’ said MMDA Chairman Atty. Ricardo Fernandez, who has been saying this at press conferences since 2019. ‘This is a paradigm shift. We are not just managing traffic. We are reimagining the relationship between the Filipino commuter and the infrastructure that serves them.’ A reporter asked whether the paradigm shift would reduce the average EDSA commute from its current two-and-a-half hours. The Chairman said this was a complex question and that the paradigm shift would address root causes.
The New Scheme, Explained
The new traffic management framework introduces a Modified Enhanced Unified Coding System that restricts vehicles ending in specific numbers on specific days, which is the same as the existing coding system but with a different acronym and a three-month window during which violations will be assessed ‘educational warnings’ rather than fines, to allow motorists time to adjust to a system that is essentially the same as the previous one with different days for some numbers.
The framework also proposes a ‘Green Lane Initiative’ for public utility vehicles, a ‘Blue Lane Protocol’ for emergency vehicles, and a ‘Yellow Lane Optimization’ for motorcycles, creating a colour-coded system that traffic management experts have praised as ambitious and which they privately note will require approximately forty percent more traffic enforcers than the MMDA currently employs to implement at the theoretical level the presentation describes.
Public Reaction
‘I have been commuting on EDSA for eleven years,’ said Marikina resident Analiza Santos, thirty-seven. ‘Every two years there is a new traffic solution. The traffic is the same. Sometimes it is worse. I now use the announcement of new traffic solutions as a benchmark for measuring the distance between hope and experience. The distance is large and has not changed.’
The full framework document is available at the MMDA website, where it can be downloaded in six to eight minutes depending on connection speed. For more Philippine news satire, see PhilStar. Comedy: NewsThump.
SOURCE: http://prat.UK