Carless
Carless
Updated 00:41am (Mla time) Sept 23, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service
[* breaking_text *] Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the September 23, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
I SAW my friend Jack Yabut on the ANC television channel last Monday. He was plugging for the World Carless Day, which is tomorrow. Like Earth Day and No Smoking Day, World Carless Day means to draw attention to a bane, in this case smog and traffic caused by motor vehicles, and to find ways to lessen it.
Jack himself had several suggestions -- organizing car pools, taking public transport (chief of them the overhead Metro Rail Transit and Light Rail Transit), biking, and walking to the office or home if they are not too far off. The trick is to take things one step at a time, he said, but to do them with some regularity. Maybe you can take public transport once a week, quite apart from your car-ban day. You do that regularly, it becomes a habit, and habits make for attitudinal changes.
Asked what inspired him to take up this crusade, Jack said that honestly it wasn't lofty heroism but plain self-interest. He wants to breathe reasonably clean air, a fact that has become less and less possible in Metro Manila today.
His concern is not exaggerated. I myself have a graphic image of Metro Manila's pollution in my head. I was on an out-of-town trip one summer's day some years ago, and as usual I took the dawn flight. I do that because I can no longer tolerate traffic, it wastes my time and frays my nerves. The plane had just taken off and I could see gray light breaking in the east. Then to my surprise, I saw a line streaking across the horizon just above the sleeping city. Everything below it was dark as soot and everything above it was clear as sky. It took some moments for me to realize what that line was. It was where the smog began, or rose up to. It startled me to realize I lived in the very depths of that dark soot. I was glad I was leaving it, if only temporarily.
The biggest contributor there are, of course, the motor vehicles. And private cars -- however more efficient their exhausts are compared to those of buses and jeepneys -- are the main culprit. That is so because of their sheer inefficiency in ferrying one or two persons from Point A to Point B at any given time compared to buses and jeepneys and trains that haul a horde of bedraggled carcasses over the same time and space. Private cars are also easily the biggest contributor to traffic by the same token. Too much space, too few people.
I myself drive, but I feel no small pangs of conscience when I see tricycles and buses groaning with human cargo. I still get pissed off when the tricycles ply the main roads, holding up traffic for the faster vehicles, and the buses block my path, particularly in the part of the SM mall that leads out to EDSA highway (a simple problem the half dozen or so traffic aides there can't seem to solve); but the recognition I am lugging my sole carcass over some distance while they are doing so hundreds of them gives me pause.
I do take the MRT, as I've said in an earlier column, going to Makati, at least on the occasions I am persuaded to go there. It is not my favorite part of the metropolis; Manila is, for reasons that have nothing to do with Atienza. It is not merely that I manage to escape the huge parking lot known as Edsa-one of the joys of taking the Metro Rail Transit is looking down at all the cars not moving below and knowing you are not there -- it is that I manage to escape the cares of finding a place to park in the huge non-parking lot known as Makati City. Jack is right: Sometimes, enlightened self-interest does the trick.
I know the arguments that have been raised against public transport. Mainly, that it sucks. It is crowded, it is slow and it is a pickpocket's or holdup man's paradise. The argument is not without merit, although, like the issue of leaving the country and working abroad, it is a chicken-and-egg tangle. The solution is itself the problem. We leave the country, the country gets worse, others find more reason to leave it. We buy more and more cars, public transport is left to the dogs or the poor, we buy more and more cars. And kill ourselves -- and our children -- with lung problems.
Or cancer: Haven't you noticed that's been on the rise over the years? But that's another story.
Clearly, government must do its job of improving public transport. Chief of them by running more trains. Omar Lopez had an interesting letter the other day (Inquirer, Sept. 21, 2004) saying we are the only country on Earth that doesn't have a decent train system and enumerating the many merits of having one. Chief of them making travel easier to and from the provinces, thereby decongesting Metro Manila.
I've said the same thing a number of times. The problem isn't the demonstrable lack of merit of trains, it is the demonstrable lack of will of government. The one thing that stands formidably in its way is the car lobby, which includes the sellers of cars, gasoline, tires and other car-related products as well as the public officials, elective or appointive, who corner funds with which to build substandard, or even non-existent, roads and bridges.
Government must do its job, but we have to do ours, too. Cars aren't just a means of transport in this country, they are a state of mind. They carry with them a culture -- a "car culture" -- that has our urban dwellers agog over Ford's invention. Jack is right, too about taking things one step at a time. Literally, in the case of walking. That is something by the way you learn when you visit Europe and other countries: though their dwellers live far more luxuriously than we do, they have not forgotten how to walk. Their own car culture has not wrecked their walking culture. A fellow Filipino once complained to me in one such sojourn: "Don't they ever think of having tricycles here?" No, my dear, they don't. Which is why they live far more luxuriously than we do.
Carless is not the end of the world. It's just the start of it.
Updated 00:41am (Mla time) Sept 23, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service
[* breaking_text *] Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the September 23, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
I SAW my friend Jack Yabut on the ANC television channel last Monday. He was plugging for the World Carless Day, which is tomorrow. Like Earth Day and No Smoking Day, World Carless Day means to draw attention to a bane, in this case smog and traffic caused by motor vehicles, and to find ways to lessen it.
Jack himself had several suggestions -- organizing car pools, taking public transport (chief of them the overhead Metro Rail Transit and Light Rail Transit), biking, and walking to the office or home if they are not too far off. The trick is to take things one step at a time, he said, but to do them with some regularity. Maybe you can take public transport once a week, quite apart from your car-ban day. You do that regularly, it becomes a habit, and habits make for attitudinal changes.
Asked what inspired him to take up this crusade, Jack said that honestly it wasn't lofty heroism but plain self-interest. He wants to breathe reasonably clean air, a fact that has become less and less possible in Metro Manila today.
His concern is not exaggerated. I myself have a graphic image of Metro Manila's pollution in my head. I was on an out-of-town trip one summer's day some years ago, and as usual I took the dawn flight. I do that because I can no longer tolerate traffic, it wastes my time and frays my nerves. The plane had just taken off and I could see gray light breaking in the east. Then to my surprise, I saw a line streaking across the horizon just above the sleeping city. Everything below it was dark as soot and everything above it was clear as sky. It took some moments for me to realize what that line was. It was where the smog began, or rose up to. It startled me to realize I lived in the very depths of that dark soot. I was glad I was leaving it, if only temporarily.
The biggest contributor there are, of course, the motor vehicles. And private cars -- however more efficient their exhausts are compared to those of buses and jeepneys -- are the main culprit. That is so because of their sheer inefficiency in ferrying one or two persons from Point A to Point B at any given time compared to buses and jeepneys and trains that haul a horde of bedraggled carcasses over the same time and space. Private cars are also easily the biggest contributor to traffic by the same token. Too much space, too few people.
I myself drive, but I feel no small pangs of conscience when I see tricycles and buses groaning with human cargo. I still get pissed off when the tricycles ply the main roads, holding up traffic for the faster vehicles, and the buses block my path, particularly in the part of the SM mall that leads out to EDSA highway (a simple problem the half dozen or so traffic aides there can't seem to solve); but the recognition I am lugging my sole carcass over some distance while they are doing so hundreds of them gives me pause.
I do take the MRT, as I've said in an earlier column, going to Makati, at least on the occasions I am persuaded to go there. It is not my favorite part of the metropolis; Manila is, for reasons that have nothing to do with Atienza. It is not merely that I manage to escape the huge parking lot known as Edsa-one of the joys of taking the Metro Rail Transit is looking down at all the cars not moving below and knowing you are not there -- it is that I manage to escape the cares of finding a place to park in the huge non-parking lot known as Makati City. Jack is right: Sometimes, enlightened self-interest does the trick.
I know the arguments that have been raised against public transport. Mainly, that it sucks. It is crowded, it is slow and it is a pickpocket's or holdup man's paradise. The argument is not without merit, although, like the issue of leaving the country and working abroad, it is a chicken-and-egg tangle. The solution is itself the problem. We leave the country, the country gets worse, others find more reason to leave it. We buy more and more cars, public transport is left to the dogs or the poor, we buy more and more cars. And kill ourselves -- and our children -- with lung problems.
Or cancer: Haven't you noticed that's been on the rise over the years? But that's another story.
Clearly, government must do its job of improving public transport. Chief of them by running more trains. Omar Lopez had an interesting letter the other day (Inquirer, Sept. 21, 2004) saying we are the only country on Earth that doesn't have a decent train system and enumerating the many merits of having one. Chief of them making travel easier to and from the provinces, thereby decongesting Metro Manila.
I've said the same thing a number of times. The problem isn't the demonstrable lack of merit of trains, it is the demonstrable lack of will of government. The one thing that stands formidably in its way is the car lobby, which includes the sellers of cars, gasoline, tires and other car-related products as well as the public officials, elective or appointive, who corner funds with which to build substandard, or even non-existent, roads and bridges.
Government must do its job, but we have to do ours, too. Cars aren't just a means of transport in this country, they are a state of mind. They carry with them a culture -- a "car culture" -- that has our urban dwellers agog over Ford's invention. Jack is right, too about taking things one step at a time. Literally, in the case of walking. That is something by the way you learn when you visit Europe and other countries: though their dwellers live far more luxuriously than we do, they have not forgotten how to walk. Their own car culture has not wrecked their walking culture. A fellow Filipino once complained to me in one such sojourn: "Don't they ever think of having tricycles here?" No, my dear, they don't. Which is why they live far more luxuriously than we do.
Carless is not the end of the world. It's just the start of it.
posted by Dante at 10:55 AM
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