Bad news, good news
Bad news, good news
Updated 11:39pm (Mla time) Nov 03, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the November 4, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
THE BAD news is the U-turn slots that now abound in Metro Manila streets. Well, they are not entirely bad news. They are good news in some places but bad news in others. The bad news is turning them into a one-size-fits-all thing. This is one size that most assuredly does not fit all.
I remember that I praised Bayani Fernando, chairman of the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority, the first time he experimented with them in some parts of Metro Manila. One of those parts was the corner of West Avenue and the EDSA highway. When there was an intersection there, traffic on West Avenue leading to EDSA was a nightmare. Particularly during rush hours, a long queue of vehicles would be stewing there, on bad days going all the way back to Baler Street, which is several corners away. The worse news was that the intersection in West Avenue and Baler itself was home to monstrous traffic.
As usually happens when traffic mounts in intersections, idiots would usurp the opposite lane, a practice benignly known as "counter-flow" but which produces the most malignant results. The problem there is that the drivers on the opposite lane do exactly the same thing. There is still one other problem there, and that is that the traffic cops or aides, who do not want to suffer the inconvenience of enforcing the rules, allow them to go ahead of the others. A gridlock is prevented at the cost of rewarding the guilty and punishing the innocent.
That used to happen routinely in West Avenue. Then when Fernando closed the intersection at West Avenue and EDSA and put a U-turn slot on EDSA, the traffic cleared. The change was dramatic. Suddenly, there was no pile of cars filling the air with smog from idling engines and drivers driving their passengers nuts and their blood pressures up from their cursing. Suddenly you could get from one end of West Avenue to the other in record time.
It would have been good news if Fernando had left it at that, or used the concept of U-turns judiciously. He did not. The horror stories have since piled up as fast as vehicles in or near the U-turn slots. I personally have seen the kind of mess it can do at the intersection of Quezon Avenue and EDSA. To cross EDSA from Quezon Avenue, you now have to turn right and take the U-turn slots in EDSA.
The problem with this is that the U-turns are located underneath an overpass. Only a narrow strip of road is left to traffic, the overpass hogging a good portion of EDSA. For those going straight ahead in the direction of the Cubao area in Quezon City, the situation is constant bedlam. With the jeeps parked in front of McDonald's and a horde pushing its way to the U-turn slot, you have to thread through the eye of a needle. On bad days, which are when the rains come, the traffic there is enough to try the patience of a saint.
The way things are, the old system where you waited your turn before traffic lights was absolute bliss. Frankly, I don't know why it hasn't been restored yet. The contrast between then and now is patent.
It's a variation of the Peter Principle. That principle, if I recall, states that in a bureaucratic situation, people tend to rise to a level of incompetence. The higher up you go, the more you reach a point where you are likely to prove incompetent. That is the case with the U-turn slots. The more they grow, the more they rise to a level of inefficiency. A U-turn slot by itself is not a bad idea. By plethora, it has become so.
Real artists, and bureaucrats, know when to stop. You don't know when to stop, well, you've seen the fate of those who refuse to give up the microphone in karaoke bars and insist on singing "My Way."
* * *
The good news is what's happened to our common parking lot. I've written about it several times in the past. The horrendous practice has been parking cars right in front of other cars. The argument for it being that the cars blocking the ones rightly parked on the slots are on neutral and can be pushed away. But over time, the illegally parked cars have rioted like weeds and formed whole queues, so that at night there is no space left to push them away. And even if there were, who wants to be pushing cars away particularly in the rain?
I had pretty much given up on it, my constant and angry remonstrations falling on deaf ears. I had cajoled, I had threatened, I had warned-the last time by saying that if someone had an emergency one night, he or she would be dead before their folk could clear a path for their cars, if at all, to bring them to a hospital. To no avail.
Then suddenly things changed. I don't know if that tragedy happened, heaven forbid it did. I don't know if my repeated expostulations and those of others finally worked. But a sign on the gates one day some weeks ago said the practice would not be tolerated anymore. At the end of the week, it said, the guards would no longer allow cars to park in front of other cars.
The guards did enforce it. Came the appointed day, they refused to allow cars to park in front of other cars. A simple exercise of will but one that gave the sensation of something dramatic. It was a blast of air in a stale room, or of sanity in a mental asylum. There were holdouts, of course, drivers who would be arguing with the guards to let them in. The guards would say they were just following orders -- I never thought those words would sound like music -- they could lose their jobs if they didn't. After some time, the holdouts gave up.
I've always said our parking lot was a microcosm of this country, a lesson in how small mistakes lead up to bigger ones. All it takes is one idiot to do something wrong and the rest follows till you have a whole mess. The exception becomes the rule, the rule the exception. Sanity becomes perversity, and perversity sanity.
Well, we've just untangled it. Maybe there's hope for the country yet.
Updated 11:39pm (Mla time) Nov 03, 2004
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the November 4, 2004 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer
THE BAD news is the U-turn slots that now abound in Metro Manila streets. Well, they are not entirely bad news. They are good news in some places but bad news in others. The bad news is turning them into a one-size-fits-all thing. This is one size that most assuredly does not fit all.
I remember that I praised Bayani Fernando, chairman of the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority, the first time he experimented with them in some parts of Metro Manila. One of those parts was the corner of West Avenue and the EDSA highway. When there was an intersection there, traffic on West Avenue leading to EDSA was a nightmare. Particularly during rush hours, a long queue of vehicles would be stewing there, on bad days going all the way back to Baler Street, which is several corners away. The worse news was that the intersection in West Avenue and Baler itself was home to monstrous traffic.
As usually happens when traffic mounts in intersections, idiots would usurp the opposite lane, a practice benignly known as "counter-flow" but which produces the most malignant results. The problem there is that the drivers on the opposite lane do exactly the same thing. There is still one other problem there, and that is that the traffic cops or aides, who do not want to suffer the inconvenience of enforcing the rules, allow them to go ahead of the others. A gridlock is prevented at the cost of rewarding the guilty and punishing the innocent.
That used to happen routinely in West Avenue. Then when Fernando closed the intersection at West Avenue and EDSA and put a U-turn slot on EDSA, the traffic cleared. The change was dramatic. Suddenly, there was no pile of cars filling the air with smog from idling engines and drivers driving their passengers nuts and their blood pressures up from their cursing. Suddenly you could get from one end of West Avenue to the other in record time.
It would have been good news if Fernando had left it at that, or used the concept of U-turns judiciously. He did not. The horror stories have since piled up as fast as vehicles in or near the U-turn slots. I personally have seen the kind of mess it can do at the intersection of Quezon Avenue and EDSA. To cross EDSA from Quezon Avenue, you now have to turn right and take the U-turn slots in EDSA.
The problem with this is that the U-turns are located underneath an overpass. Only a narrow strip of road is left to traffic, the overpass hogging a good portion of EDSA. For those going straight ahead in the direction of the Cubao area in Quezon City, the situation is constant bedlam. With the jeeps parked in front of McDonald's and a horde pushing its way to the U-turn slot, you have to thread through the eye of a needle. On bad days, which are when the rains come, the traffic there is enough to try the patience of a saint.
The way things are, the old system where you waited your turn before traffic lights was absolute bliss. Frankly, I don't know why it hasn't been restored yet. The contrast between then and now is patent.
It's a variation of the Peter Principle. That principle, if I recall, states that in a bureaucratic situation, people tend to rise to a level of incompetence. The higher up you go, the more you reach a point where you are likely to prove incompetent. That is the case with the U-turn slots. The more they grow, the more they rise to a level of inefficiency. A U-turn slot by itself is not a bad idea. By plethora, it has become so.
Real artists, and bureaucrats, know when to stop. You don't know when to stop, well, you've seen the fate of those who refuse to give up the microphone in karaoke bars and insist on singing "My Way."
* * *
The good news is what's happened to our common parking lot. I've written about it several times in the past. The horrendous practice has been parking cars right in front of other cars. The argument for it being that the cars blocking the ones rightly parked on the slots are on neutral and can be pushed away. But over time, the illegally parked cars have rioted like weeds and formed whole queues, so that at night there is no space left to push them away. And even if there were, who wants to be pushing cars away particularly in the rain?
I had pretty much given up on it, my constant and angry remonstrations falling on deaf ears. I had cajoled, I had threatened, I had warned-the last time by saying that if someone had an emergency one night, he or she would be dead before their folk could clear a path for their cars, if at all, to bring them to a hospital. To no avail.
Then suddenly things changed. I don't know if that tragedy happened, heaven forbid it did. I don't know if my repeated expostulations and those of others finally worked. But a sign on the gates one day some weeks ago said the practice would not be tolerated anymore. At the end of the week, it said, the guards would no longer allow cars to park in front of other cars.
The guards did enforce it. Came the appointed day, they refused to allow cars to park in front of other cars. A simple exercise of will but one that gave the sensation of something dramatic. It was a blast of air in a stale room, or of sanity in a mental asylum. There were holdouts, of course, drivers who would be arguing with the guards to let them in. The guards would say they were just following orders -- I never thought those words would sound like music -- they could lose their jobs if they didn't. After some time, the holdouts gave up.
I've always said our parking lot was a microcosm of this country, a lesson in how small mistakes lead up to bigger ones. All it takes is one idiot to do something wrong and the rest follows till you have a whole mess. The exception becomes the rule, the rule the exception. Sanity becomes perversity, and perversity sanity.
Well, we've just untangled it. Maybe there's hope for the country yet.
posted by Dante at 1:09 PM
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