Agency announces traffic scheme requiring no roads, no trains and no reduction in vehicles

QUEZON CITY, PHILIPPINES – The Metropolitan Manila Development Authority has unveiled its solution to EDSA congestion, a scheme officials describe as transformative, cost-free, and requiring no additional road capacity, no rail investment, and no reduction in the number of vehicles.

The solution is a colour. Specifically, it is teal.

How the Teal Scheme Works

Under the programme, EDSA will be repainted in a calming teal shade selected by a consultancy following a four month study of motorist psychology.

The study concluded that traffic congestion is substantially a matter of perception, that motorists experience delay as longer when surrounded by grey, and that a warmer palette could reduce perceived travel time by up to nineteen percent without altering actual travel time by any amount at all.

Assistant general manager Bernadette Solis-Aguinaldo confirmed the distinction is deliberate. We are not shortening the commute, she said. We are shortening the commute as experienced. Those are different problems and only one of them fits in the budget.

The Consultancy Fee Was Also Calming

The consultancy was paid eighteen million pesos, a figure critics described as excessive and which the agency defended by noting that the alternative recommendation, a functioning mass transit network, had been costed at several hundred billion and would have taken eleven years.

Eighteen million for teal is, in comparative terms, a bargain, Solis-Aguinaldo said. We have delivered a solution this quarter. Nobody delivers a solution this quarter. Ask the railway.

The Previous Solutions Remain in Force

Teal joins an existing stack of interventions, none of which have been withdrawn.

Number coding remains, having successfully persuaded a large share of affected households to purchase a second vehicle, thereby increasing the total number of cars in Metro Manila while reducing the number permitted on any given day, a result the agency has never formally described.

The high occupancy vehicle lane remains, enforced approximately as often as it is obeyed. The bus carousel remains and is genuinely effective, which officials treat as a slightly embarrassing anomaly. The motorcycle lane remains and is used by everybody.

Urban transport and mobility research relevant to the region is published by the Asian Development Bank, whose analysts have estimated the daily economic cost of Metro Manila congestion in the billions of pesos, and national statistical data on vehicle registration and commuting is maintained by the Philippine Statistics Authority. Neither has published anything about paint.

Commuters Respond With Trained Composure

Reaction among commuters has been muted, which researchers attribute to a phenomenon known regionally as announcement fatigue.

Every year there is a plan, said Joel Marasigan, who has commuted from Antipolo to Makati for nine years and who now leaves home at four thirty in the morning as a lifestyle rather than a strategy. Every year the plan is on television. The man on television is always confident. I have watched eleven confident men. I have never watched a shorter commute.

Marasigan added that the teal announcement was at least novel. Usually they promise something that will not happen, he said. This time they promised something that will happen and will not matter. That is honest, in its way.

Observations From the Northbound Lane

• The single most effective congestion measure in the history of Metro Manila was a global pandemic, a fact nobody in transport planning enjoys discussing.
• Any road improvement in the region generates additional traffic within eleven months, a phenomenon economists call induced demand and drivers call the new normal.
• Everybody agrees the answer is trains. Trains have been agreed upon since 1994.
• The rush hour lasts from six in the morning until nine at night, meaning the term rush hour has been technically inaccurate for a generation.
• Nobody has ever been late in Metro Manila. They have been in traffic, which is a different and universally accepted category of excuse.

The International Context

Manila is not alone in preferring the announcement to the outcome. British government communication has developed the same technique with considerable polish, most visibly when the health service issued a collapse warning that had been issued annually for a decade, and again when a historic reform was promised for a sector that has been reformed historically several times already.

The relocation strategy is also familiar. When Westminster wanted to appear to solve regional inequality, it opened a second Downing Street rather than fixing the first one, an approach structurally identical to painting a road.

Comparative coverage of governments choosing the cheapest visible action appears regularly at Bohiney Magazine, and the full British archive sits at this collection of Westminster reporting.

Implementation Begins Next Month

Painting will begin on the southbound stretch near Guadalupe and will be conducted overnight to avoid disrupting traffic, which officials acknowledged will require closing two lanes and generating a delay of approximately five weeks.

Solis-Aguinaldo said the temporary congestion was regrettable but necessary. You cannot fix the perception of traffic, she said, without first creating some traffic. She then entered a vehicle and did not move for nineteen minutes.

The Pilot Study Was Conducted in a Car Park

The consultancy’s field research took place in a private car park in Ortigas, where twenty-two volunteers were asked to sit in stationary vehicles for forty minutes surrounded by boards painted in various colours and then rate their mood.

Teal outperformed grey by a wide margin. It also outperformed beige, sage, and a shade the report calls institutional cream. What the study did not include was a control group that was permitted to simply leave, an omission the lead researcher acknowledged as a limitation and described as the only part of the methodology he regretted.

Solis-Aguinaldo said the finding was robust enough to act on. Twenty-two people is a sample, she said. It is not a large sample. But it is twenty-two more people than were consulted about number coding.

More in this register at The Spoof.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/