THE traffic challenge that is hounding Metro Manila is nothing new. It has been hounding us for decades now. Some of us will remember the “Jingle Bags” and the Chocolate Boys in the 1990s, when the flyovers on Edsa were being built. Furthermore, road congestion (a better description of traffic) is a normal occurrence in many expanding cities around the world.
The Bangkok traffic was a legend of the 1990s. Recently, Jakarta has also been experiencing similar types of jams. So, if road congestion is a normal occurrence in our expanding metropolis, do we take it as a given? Do we simply give in to the request of the government for understanding? I believe that we need to go back and look at how we analyze road congestion. For, if the problem is not clearly identified, all the proposed solutions will most likely exacerbate, instead of alleviate, the problem.
For all intent and purposes, road congestion exists because the supply of road is fixed in the short term (a perfectly inelastic condition in Economics). Meanwhile, the demand for road is characterized by various users—students (all levels), workers (government and private), business, leisure and movers. Each of the users has different valuations of his or her road use, but the majority are forced by schedules to be in their schools and workplaces on set times.
Moreover, roads are generally not charged a fee so, in effect, they are “free” to use. This creates a condition where the demand for road exceeds significantly the supply. This is a classic example of a common resource good. Common resource goods have this property: road use is rival, meaning, when one car is on the road, other cars cannot be on the same road space. But it is nonexclusive, meaning, other road users cannot be prevented from using the same road space. Although there are people willing to pay a price for road use, it does not happen because the demand for free or lower-price use has overwhelmed supply tremendously (See graph from www.economics-online.co.uk).
Under this condition, it is clear that, in the short term, road supply will be fixed. Therefore, the first best solution of expanding the road network is not in the short term. The second-best solution is to tinker with demand. This, too, is not simple, because there are different valuations for road use. Those who have fixed schedules have limited options, because changing schedules will affect the way of doing things. Staggered business hours can only work to selected sectors, like private services. Other tinkerings, such as the number coding, traffic lights, traffic enforcers or traffic management, are not effective, because the different schemes that are in place have loopholes in implementation. Moreover, they are implemented like broken lines, with each local government in Metro Manila having its own rules and having different levels of capacities to implement rules, adding to further congestion. Combining all these conditions has made the traffic challenge no longer as an urgent issue, no longer as an emergency issue, but a disaster-level situation. The amount estimated to being lost in traffic daily should alarm the government to do more. With about 40 percent of gross domestic product being produced in Metro Manila, the national government cannot allow the current short-term conditions to go on and just plead for understanding.
The first thing that comes to mind is to put the full government resource to traffic management to full use. The budgets of the agencies under the Department of Transportation and Communications, the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority and the local government units on traffic must be consolidated to respond to the daily costs being lost. These resources must be implemented under a single coordinating mechanism that has authority over traffic management under the national government.
The current setup of the Highway Patrol Group taking over Edsa already shows that the national government can come in to solve traffic. But without a single command line, efforts and impacts will be limited. With the full resource, the national government should have a standard set of rules for traffic management all over the Metro.
The agency that will be tasked to do this should be manned by professionals, particularly those assigned in streets. Their pay should be upgraded, commensurate to the cost that they are trying to abate.
The agency should be able to implement clearing of all roads, regardless if they are national or local. Part of its responsibility is also to plan phaseout of vehicles; no-parking, no-car policy for those buying cars; create pricing schemes; and road discipline and education, among others, and institutionalize them. This situation is called for, since the traffic problem is going to get worse before it will get better with the delays in the major infrastructure projects in the city. We are in a disaster condition, it does not merit soft and business-as-usual solutions, but hard and politically difficult ones.