HOW TO SOLVE THE MANILA TRAFFIC JAM

A Position Paper by Samantha Loj Batara (2000)

University of the Philippines

Students and employees in Manila nowadays must allot so much time for travel in
their daily schedule. Traffic can be so jam packed that what used to be a five-
minute ride can become an agonizing 2 hours. Administrations after another have
assigned experts to design strategies to control and ease traffic. The slow traffic,
however, remains a menace to city residents.

The traffic is not an untamed monster. Traffic problems can be solved, if only
lawmakers can act as planners and find ways and means of decentralizing the
services that citizens can only presently avail in Metro Manila.

First, educational centers of excellence must be established in regional centers, if

not in every province. Students flock to Manila in search for better quality
education. The best universities are concentrated in and around the university belt.
Residential areas around these educational institutions cannot possibly house all
the students attending these universities. Students have to travel to and from school
once or even twice a day. The more the students who travel, the more motor
vehicles are needed to ply the city streets.

A variation could be the relocation of the universities and colleges to more open
country sides and for every one of these institutions to build enough student
dormitories in their campuses. Students don’t need to go home within the term.
They can rather focus their time more in their studies and not in traveling.

Same is true with industries. The manufacturing sector can relocate their factories
to the nearby provinces. Their heavy equipment and long vehicles don’t need to
take much of the spaces in our city streets. And like the relocated schools, business
firms can also build housing units for their employees within the vicinity or
compound of their factory. This saves workers from the hassles of running after
rides to and from work. It would also contribute to the efficiency and productivity
of business firms as the man-hours lost in travel could instead be translated to
actual production inputs.

A lot of service firms also use the streets fronting their shops for parking spaces,
both for company vehicles and those of customers. It should be a prerequisite to
the issuance of a business license for the applying firm to have an adequate service
area to avoid having service vehicles and the vehicles serviced, parked along busy
streets.

The government should, of course, follow course, if not initiate the move. The
concentration of government agencies and offices in Manila necessitates the travel
of people from the provinces to the city in order to get important things done. To
seek travel documentations like clearances, certifications, and licenses one has to
join the throng of city dwellers in the race for a public transport just to reach the
various issuing offices. Government offices that grant clearances like the NBI and
the BIR, those that issue travel documents like the DFA, and those that issue
licenses like the PRC, should create provincial centers which can decentralize the
same, if not more efficient, authority and services that one can now only avail of in
Manila.

Government offices should become more efficient, too, to avoid asking customers
to make multiple trips just to effect a single transaction. It should also be worth
considering putting all government offices together in the same one large
compound so that a customer does not need to travel from one distant location to
another in order to work out interrelated transactions.

The unnecessary concentration of people in Manila can be averted, by

decentralizing the institutions, agencies and offices that attract or even force
citizens to travel to the city. By acts of law, educational and business
establishments can contain their personnel by providing them housing and health
centers in their campuses. Less people on the road means lighter traffic.