devera12

Column: Beyond Images
By Atty. Leonard de Vera
Title: We Must Decongest Metro Manila

We live like ants in Metro Manila. Like ants, we go on a never-ending circle of movements leading to nowhere.

We build more LRTs and MRTs in Metro Manila to lighten up the traffic mess. Yet, yearly, we introduce thousands more of buses and jeepneys, trucks and cars, motorcycles and tricycles to ply our narrow streets. We do not create new streets nor expand existing ones. We have created a perfect recipe for traffic chaos.

Let us appeal to common sense. If we create a good railroad (train) system that will ferry hundreds of thousands of people who work in Metro Manila but live in the nearby provinces of Laguna, Cavite and Batangas in the South, and in Bulacan, Pampanga, and Nueva Ecija in the North, imagine how this will greatly decongest the population of Metro Manila.

Not only will it lessen the overpopulation of the more than 12 million people of Metro Manila residents who live in poor and unhealthy and cramped-up conditions, it will lessen the volume of vehicles entering Metro Manila.

A good train system will make daily commute possible from these nearby provinces. The delivery of food, vegetables, goods, products of all kinds can be done in the most orderly manner thru the railroad system.

The air in Metro Manila will be less polluted with smoke and fumes. More factories will move out to the nearby provinces where the cost of purchased or rented land and labor are not as prohibitive as that of Metro Manila.

More lives will be saved as ambulances and private vehicles rushing emergency patients to the hospitals are able to reach the emergency rooms on time.

There will be less crimes of road-rage brought about by the maddening effect of an insane traffic monstrosity. A monstrous traffic creates monsters out of some desperate drivers.

Private businesses and public services of the government need not move out of Metro Manila. But the availability of an efficient public transportation system like that offered by the railroad will encourage these businesses and services to open more branches in the provinces even if they chose not to move out of Metro Manila. More private schools, hospitals, manufacturing plants, and thousands of small and medium-range industries will burgeon in the provinces.

Thousands of steady jobs will be created. Workers will live in decent homes unlike those living in rat-holes apartments and boarding rooms in Metro Manila.

This is one project we must focus on. This is one necessity that will and can justify the grant of emergency powers, if need be, to fast-track the completion of an efficient railroad system. Emergency powers are needed to address the stultifying effects of the squatters and political blackmails of some politicians.

Point to any prosperous country in the world, in Asia, America, Europe and Africa, and you will not find one wealthy country that does not have an efficient railroad system.

Let us wake up from our catatonic stupor engendered by lack of imagination. Let us be thinking men. Not like ants in perpetual motion constantly searching for food. Man not only searches for food but needs a decent home, working in productive jobs, in an orderly and peaceful society. This is what makes us- Human.

Atty. De Vera is a trial lawyer. He is Chairman of the Equal Justice for All Movement (E-Just)