ON the evening of September 24, the outermost northbound lane of the Southern Luzon Expressway (SLEX) was closed to make way for the construction of a R10-billion four-kilometer extension of the Skyway from barangay Cupang to barangay Putatan in Muntinlupa City. Motorists were caught unprepared and by September 26, there was a huge traffic jam. It is expected to continue until construction of the Skyway extension is completed by December, 2020.
During this construction period, SLEX will not be an “expressway” for the use of which motorists have been paying toll. Secretary Arthur Tugade of the Department of Transportation (DoTr), co-chairman of the Toll Regulatory Board, has thus asked the board to look into the possibility of reducing the toll during this period.
In the Senate, Senators Grace Poe and Sherwyn Gatchalian suggested such a measure. In the House of Representatives, Laguna Rep. Sol Aragones filed a resolution urging SMC Tollways to suspend collection of the toll or lower it for six months.
The SLEX gridlock is only the latest development in the overall traffic problem of Metro Manila and other major population centers of the country. All the while, most of our attention has been focused on Epifanio de los Santos Ave. (EDSA), Metro Manila’s arterial road, but gridlocks are really all over the nation.
So many public works projects are underway to provide new routes for the hundreds of thousands of vehicles that are added every year. In the last three years of the new Duterte administration, Secretary Tugade has jumpstarted so many such projects all over the country, among them the Metro Manila Subway, Metro Rail Transit-7, Light Rail Transit Line 1, and Cavite LRT Extension.
Elsewhere in the country, projects now undergoing construction include LRT 2 East Extension, Philippine National Railways Clark Phase 1, other PNR projects in Laguna and Bicol, LRT 2 West Extension, Subic-Clark Railway, and Mindanao Railway. The DoTr has completed 64 airport projects nationwide, with 133 more ongoing, 22 commercial and tourism projects with another 122 underway. All this is part of a catch-up plan to address a 20-year infrastructure backlog, Secretary Tugade said.
The constant traffic gridlock along EDSA and other parts of Metro Manila and now the traffic jam along SLEX may indeed look like a crisis to some, but projects are underway to solve them, Secretary Tugade said, including the SLEX skyway extension in Muntinlupa.
