THE Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) and the Metro Pacific Tollways Corp. will open this month the NLEX (North Luzon Expressway) Harbor Link Segment 10. The elevated highway runs from the NLEX in Karuhatan, Valenzuela City, to a new interchange at C3 Road in Caloocan City. A dry run for the opening was held Wednesday.
Segment 10 will serve as an alternate corridor for vehicles travelling from North and Central Luzon to Quezon City and other parts of Metro Manila. Today, all traffic from the north along NLEX ends up at either the Mindanao exit or the Balintawak exit. At Balintawak, the vehicles, including many cargo trucks going to the Manila Port Area, join the huge traffic jam at Epifanio de los Santos Ave. (EDSA).
EDSA has long been Metro Manila’s main traffic problem – from its start in Caloocan, to Quezon City, Mandaluyong City, Makati City, and Pasay City. Metro Manila’s main streets radiating from Manila cross EDSA, adding to its traffic load.
With the construction of Segment 10, a great deal of the NLEX traffic will now be able to avoid EDSA and the various congested roads to the Port Area. This will specially benefit the thousands of cargo trucks bearing goods to markets in Metro Manila and beyond.
On the same day that a dry run for the opening of Segment 10 was held last Wednesday, news reports told of a drop in the country’s vehicle sales to a 33-month low for January, 2019 – 26,888 units – down from 31,645 in January, 2018.
The old problem of Metro Manila’s atrocious traffic, especially along EDSA, has long been attributed to the fact that hundreds of thousands of vehicles are added every year without any increase in the amount of road space available.
In the effort to find solutions to the problem, one-fifth of all vehicles are now effectively kept off city streets by the plate number-coding scheme.
There is a proposal to ban parking on all city streets. At night and much of the daytime, Metro Manila’s streets are lined by parked vehicles owned by residents without space for parking in their own lots.
But the best solution to the traffic problem is still the construction of more road space to accommodate the ever increasing number of vehicles. The opening this month of Segment 10 is part of this solution.
“Build, Build, Build” is the Duterte administration’s massive infrastructure construction program – for new airports and seaports, for schools and other buildings, and for roads and bridges. Segment 10 is part of this nationwide program that should launch the country into a new era of economic growth.
