Traffic? Terrific!
MEDIUM RARE
Last December, the Christmas gift I got for a friend – he is patient, born with a sunny disposition, cheerful in every weather – was a T-shirt with a drawing of drivers smiling in close-up with the legend “Heavy Traffic. Happy People.”
I thought the slogan was worthy of an endorsement by the government of the Republic of the Philippines, at the very least DOT and MMDA. In four words, a simple, straightforward truth about our patient, smiling people (like my friend). When I went back to the mall where I had bought the shirt, I could not remember which turn to take, so I lost the chance to have my own shirt.
Heavy traffic on EDSA, the longest democratic space; Quezon Ave., no. 2 or 3 on MMDA’s heavy-traffic list; Ortigas, where cars carrying students to and from ICA, Xavier, Poveda, and La Salle crisscross two times a day, where every major bank has a branch or even two or three, and structures tall and taller house shopping malls and condominiums. Through it all, drivers and passengers take it all in stride. If there have been instances of road rage, they are possibly rare and maybe not dramatic enough to merit a report on the 6 o’clock news.
The way we – motorists and passengers – describe and experience EDSA traffic, one could imagine the highway as being worse than the worst in the world, which happens to be a fact, yet the gargantuan Gordian knot aching to be cut is nothing more than a momentary inconvenience to those who are old enough to count to 10, inhale and exhale, and count from one to 10 again. What I’m trying to say is, if EDSA is bad, how come it’s not worse when it comes to the wear and tear of the people’s nerves? (What gets on my nerves is knowing that cars of government VIPs are allowed to use the exclusive bus-only lane!)
Consider: EDSA hosts 400,000 cars daily when its carrying capacity is 300,000. Each year 430,000 new vehicles are sold – guess where most of them end up? Accidents (or incidents) bring traffic to a 30-minute standstill, the backlog stretching 2.5 km requiring 42 minutes to clear. Our traffic the worst in the world? Bring it on!