Authority Calls New System Quote Directionally Unified Mobility And Notes Implementation Begins Monday
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MMDA Announces Traffic Solution That Requires All Manila Drivers To Drive In The Same Direction Simultaneously
METRO MANILA — The Metropolitan Manila Development Authority announced Tuesday a comprehensive new traffic management framework called Directionally Unified Mobility, or DUM, under which all vehicles operating on Metro Manila’s major arterial roads will be required, during designated peak hours, to travel in a single unified direction determined by the MMDA on a day-by-day basis and communicated through a notification system to be developed.
MMDA Chairman Ernesto Pagkalinawan-Soriano unveiled the framework at a press conference at the agency’s Makati headquarters, flanked by diagrams showing traffic flowing smoothly in a single direction around a simplified representation of Metro Manila. Chairman Pagkalinawan-Soriano described DUM as “a paradigm shift in how Metro Manila thinks about mobility” and said the agency was “excited to implement a solution that addresses the fundamental cause of traffic, which is vehicles going in different directions.”
“The reason Metro Manila traffic is bad,” the Chairman explained, “is that vehicles are trying to go to different places at the same time. If we can get vehicles all going in the same direction, the fundamental conflict is resolved.”
A journalist at the press conference raised a question about how drivers who needed to travel to destinations in directions other than the designated unified direction would manage their commutes. The Chairman said this concern would be “addressed in the implementation guidelines, which are being finalized.”
The Implementation Plan
The DUM implementation plan, distributed to media in a fourteen-page document, describes a system in which Metro Manila’s road network is divided into four quadrants. On alternating days, the unified direction will rotate: Monday north, Tuesday south, Wednesday east, Thursday west, Friday north again, and so on. Weekend unified directions will be announced at the discretion of the MMDA Chairman based on “prevailing traffic conditions and special events.”
The plan acknowledges that “some drivers may find that the unified direction on a given day does not correspond to their intended destination.” For these drivers, the plan proposes the use of what it calls “strategic staging,” in which drivers travel in the unified direction to a point from which they can access their destination by navigating through smaller streets that are not subject to the DUM requirements.
The smaller streets are, by the MMDA’s own previous assessments, already severely congested. The DUM plan does not address this.
This kind of traffic solution that solves one aspect of a complex problem by displacing its complexity elsewhere is consistent with a long pattern in urban traffic management of treating visible congestion on major roads while intensifying invisible congestion on minor roads.
Reaction From Commuters
Commuter reaction to the DUM announcement has been, on social media platforms, spirited. Several posts pointed out that requiring all drivers to travel north on Mondays would produce a situation in which no driver could travel from the northern suburbs to the city center on Mondays, which is when many workers in the city center need to travel from the northern suburbs to the city center.
MMDA communications staff responded to several of these posts by explaining that “Directionally Unified Mobility is a conceptual framework that will be refined during the stakeholder consultation phase.” The stakeholder consultation phase, one communications staffer clarified in a subsequent post, “has not yet been scheduled.”
One widely shared post compared the DUM framework to “telling everyone in a swimming pool to swim in the same direction, which would be great if you only needed to swim in that direction and terrible if you needed to get out of the pool.” The MMDA did not respond to this specific post.
Expert Opinion
Traffic engineering consultants contacted by the Manila Bulletin described the DUM framework as “conceptually unusual” and “not consistent with established traffic engineering principles.” One consultant, who declined to be named, said the framework appeared to be “based on a misunderstanding of why traffic congestion occurs” and that its implementation would likely “make traffic substantially worse in ways that are straightforwardly predictable.”
Chairman Pagkalinawan-Soriano, asked about the expert concerns, said the critics were “thinking about traffic in the old way” and that DUM represented “a new paradigm that requires new thinking.” He did not specify what the new thinking was.
This is consistent with a wider pattern in government innovation where frameworks described as paradigm-shifting are, on examination, primarily paradigm-describing, with the description producing the appearance of innovation without its content.
Implementation Timeline
DUM is scheduled to begin implementation “in the third quarter,” which is the MMDA’s term for a period between July and September that has, in previous MMDA announcements, often expanded to include the subsequent two quarters as “transition periods.” The Chairman expressed confidence that the timeline would be met, noting that “Metro Manila deserves a traffic solution and DUM is that solution.”
For more on Metro Manila traffic management innovation, see The Daily Mash for related British urban transport satire.
The implementation guidelines will be released “when they are ready.” The traffic on EDSA continues in its customary multiple directions.