“THIS 2020, by this Christmas, Christmas will be very happy for our countrymen. The landscape of Metro Manila will be changed completely,” Secretary Mark Villar of the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) said this weekend. “This is the year we will decongest EDSA.”
EDSA traffic has been a problem for years, highlighting Metro Manila’s ill reputation as one of the world’s worst places in which to drive a car. When President Duterte was elected in 2016, one of his earliest moves was to act on the traffic problem and asked Congress for emergency powers to do it. The Senate held several hearings but never approved the sought emergency powers, until the President finally said he was no longer pushing for them.
Then in an interview with in Davao City in June last year, the President said quite unexpectedly that traffic from Cubao to Makati would improve before the end of the year. “You just wait,” he said. “I don’t want to preempt but things will improve maybe, God willing, by December…. You don’t have to worry about traffic. Cubao to Makati just about five minutes away.”
Motorists who normally took an hour to make the trip were understandably dubious but lower officials down the line took all possible steps to try to make it happen. The Metro Manila Development Authority created a task force dedicated to the project. Other government agencies joined in the search for solutions to Metro Manila’s traffic problem. But it defied all efforts to solve it.
In his State of the Nation Address in July, 2019, the President gave the nation’s mayors 60 days “to reclaim all public roads being used for private ends.” For this was one of the reasons for traffic jams – many streets and sidewalks are blocked by parked cars, stores and vendors intruding into sidewalks, and other obstructions. Last February, the mayors were given another 75 days to continue the road clearing campaign.
All these efforts stemmed from the original presidential promise to solve Metro Manila’s traffic problem. The President’s original call for a five-minute Cubao-to-Makati trip by December could not be achieved, but not from want of trying.
Last week, Secretary Villar came out with the announcement: “This year will be a turning point for Metro Manila. This is the year that we will decongest EDSA.” This will be done, he said, with two major projects that will be completed this year – the NLEX Harbor Link Segment 10 and San Miguel Corp.’s Skyway Stage 3 project.
The first – already 99 percent complete – is a new highway connecting NLEX and Manila’s pier area via Navotas. The second is the Skyway 3 project connecting SLEX and NLEX – from Gil Puyat Ave. in Makati to San Juan to Manila to Balintawak in Quezon City. The first will divert 30,000 vehicles from EDSA; the second will relieve EDSA of another 100,000 vehicles.
It may take a bit longer than President Duterte’s original expectation, but that original call no doubt pushed Secretary Villar and all the other officials concerned to do everything possible to carry it out. We will thus have this coming Christmas season that five-minute EDSA trip we have all been hoping for.
