How To Solve EDSA Traffic

I am writing this article to address one of the largest problems plaguing the main thoroughfare of Metro Manila - Sharon Cuneta's EDSA posters. No! Wait! I meant traffic! My mind slipped! Sharon's posters are large, but they're hardly a problem. Unless they start falling on people, of course. Then we'd have real issues, such as should we still consider Sharon crushing people with her ass a joke? (probably not, but it's worth debating)

Anyway, the past few months, various measures have been introduced in an attempt to declog the overloaded road, from the reintroduction of the color coding scheme, to the catching of colorum buses, to the removal of any bus that has the name or face of Claire De La Fuente in it. So far, it hasn't really been working.

Of course so far, the issue has been that there are far too many buses that ply the route everday and that there are never enough passengers to fill all the buses up, which causes them to wait longer, which causes lanes to get blocked, and causes the private vehicles to get snarled in traffic. Makes sense, but then again, we can also reverse the idea.

I remember before when I was still working in my last company, I'd go to the MRT Guadalupe station every night and see the problem in a different light. "Holy shit," I thought, "we sure have a lot of signboards with half-naked men. The foreigners must think the entire nation's ga... " WAIT! That' s not it! I meant "we sure have a lot of private vehicles!" Yeah, that was what I was thinking. For real. So yeah. Anywaaaaay...

What if the issue is that there are too many private vehicles filled with people who could in turn fill the buses that are parked on the side of the road? If the buses were utilized more and the private vehicles would occupy less space, there'd be less waiting time for the buses and there'd be less ball-punching traffic every night.

There's the argument that buses are asshole drivers, but as a driver I often think that for every "FUCK YOU AND YOUR CLAN" that I utter at a public vehicle, I do so at three private assholes vehicles. Because it's true. The number coding? How many vehicles are using NBI carplates? JOURNALIST carplates? LAWYER carplates? You never see these infernal cheating devices in buses. You dont see a "BUSSDRIVER" carplate in front of a bus. You just dont. It's the private vehicles that tend to cheat more. More specifically, it's those oversized SUVs. I hate those with a passion.

It makes sense. Private vehicles are the bane of EDSA. But why is it that we hardly pinpoint private cars as the culprit? Well most of the lawmakers aren't fans of buses other than the ones that they privately own. I bet Toyota and Honda are in it too. We're probably the only country in the world where there's no mechanism to remove old and poorly maintained cars on the road. It's not uncommon to see cars that are third, fourth, and fifth hand, some of them initially purchased from the first batch of Spaniards that landed in our country some 400 years ago (you'll know them by their carplates that start with the letter Ñ )

Most countries put penalties in trying to make a car stay on the road past its effective life. I know coming up with rules that will exclude some cars from being used in the country's roads paid for everybody (except for Lawyers and Doctors who refuse to file proper taxes and homeless people) seems unfair. But that's just life. The public transportation system is there for a reason and it's not that it's being overutilized - it's underutilized and mismanaged.

And the next time somebody who drives a car to and from school/work starts bitching about EDSA traffic, tell him to commute. He'd be contributing to the solution in so many ways, not to mention that by increasing the pool of commuters he's minimizing the odds of some other commuter getting hit with a falling Sharon Cuneta billboard.

Statistics worth both ways.