CONGRESS should grant the emergency powers sought by President Duterte soonest to address the traffic problem in Metro Manila, which is only expected to get worse with the coming Christmas season and the continuing increase in construction activities.
Urban planner Roque A. Magno, a professor at the University of the Philippines’s School of Urban and Regional Planning (SURP), said Congress can put enough safeguards so that the grant of emergency powers on procurement will not be abused.
Earlier, the Senate Committee on Public Services chairman, Sen. Grace Poe, suspended the hearings on the proposed grant of emergency powers to Mr. Duterte to speed up the procurement process for infrastructure projects relating to easing traffic in the National Capital Region.
The hearings were put on hold pending the submission by the Department of Transportation (DOTr) of a detailed list of projects for which the procurement process will be relaxed to speed up implementation.
The Committee on Transportation of the House of Representatives had, likewise, asked the DOTr for a detailed proposal regarding the projects: where the proposed emergency powers will be used and whether these will be used only in Metro Manila or throughout the country.
Magno said Congress should, instead, provide a time limit for the exercise of the emergency powers, since the projects for which the emergency powers are being proposed have already been identified, such as the connector road between the North Luzon Expressway and the South Luzon Expressway.
Magno said the delays in the construction of vital infrastructure projects are caused by issues regarding the acquisition of right-of-way and the slow pace of completion of other works, which are not within the government’s control, such as construction works by the Manila Electric Co. and water-distribution concessionaires.
“Regarding the emergency powers, they should give it; otherwise, President Duterte would have an excuse why the traffic problem was not solved. But they should give it a time duration,” Magno said in an interview with the BusinessMirror.
Duterte is averse to the bidding process, which he said had worked against the government because the lowest bidders always provide substandard materials and services, leaving the government shortchanged on the contracts in the long run.
As an urban planner, Magno enumerated the measures which the government may take to quickly solve the traffic problem.
“First, we should finish all pending projects immediately,” he said, citing the pending Nlex-Slex connector road project that could immediately ease traffic by allowing cargo trucks to go from North Luzon to South Luzon and vice versa without having to traverse the streets of Metro Manila.
He said there should also be a metro-wide land use zoning ordinance, and a common ordinance with regard to traffic schemes, like the number-coding scheme among all the cities of Metro Manila.
Another solution is the removal of U-turn slots and their replacement by a channelized left-turn lane to remove bottlenecks at these U-turn slots.
“But whatever traffic schemes we put in place, it will always boil down to the people who use the streets, which is why discipline is still the best measure that we can all implement to ease traffic. The government, for its part, should enforce this discipline and make the citizens follow the rules,” Magno said.