DEAR Mr. President:
I think that it is wrong to ask if there is “traffic” or not, because there is always a “traffic flow” whenever there is at least one vehicle on the road.
Perhaps our wrong understanding of the term “traffic” is one of the reasons why we have not solved the problem after all these years. In other words, the problem is not the “traffic” itself because it is always there. The problem or the challenge is how to make it flow faster.
Internationally, the flow of traffic is always measured in terms of travel time from point to point. For example, it could be measured in terms of hour many kilometers per hour is covered when driving from Alabang to Monumento. Or in other words, how many minutes it takes to travel the same distance.
And to measure whether there is an improvement or not, the data from one point in time should be compared against another point in time.
So how can we make the flow of traffic go faster?
The obvious answer to that is to either widen the streets or to lessen the vehicles that are using the streets.
I think that some local government units (LGUs) have already widened the streets where it is possible, but if that is not possible in some places, they could also try clearing the streets of many obstructions, including vehicles that are illegally parked temporarily, but sometimes permanently.
How do we lessen the vehicles that are using the streets?
I think that the more the public transport system will become better, the more people will give up their cars, or at least they will reduce their rate of usage.
But my favorite solution to the problem is stricter enforcement of traffic related laws, such as emissions standards and safety standards. I think that the more the government will strictly enforce emissions standards, the more vehicles could be banned from the streets.
It might sound unrelated, but the more the government become stricter in issuing driver’s licenses, the lesser bad drivers will be banned from driving, for whatever reason. The problem is, there is still a lot of corruption in the issuance of driver’s licenses.
And I think that the Insurance Commission (IC) could also help by building a database of moving violators, so that they could increase the premiums of those drivers that have terrible driving records.
Mr. President, as far as I know, the government is not yet fully utilizing Information and Communications Technology (ICT) tools in traffic planning and management systems. For that matter, the government is also not yet using ICT tools in creating and scheduling the departure and arrival of buses, aside from not being able to designate and build good quality bus stops that are safe to use.
Ideally, the public would find it easy to plan their bus trips if they could know when a bus will arrive and stop in a certain bus stop. There could be a long list of data sources that could be used for traffic planning, among them are data sets from satellite and drone providers./PN
