Solving Philippine's traffic problem

A lot of news had been flashed on TV and published on the paper about the problems regarding road traffic.  LTRFB vs MMDA, Municipal mayors against BoC and many other things.  They put so much issue on the congested ports and truck bans causing traffic in the metro side (actually not only the metro side but the majority of Philippine roads)  but the real issue is, many car owners use the roads that are supposed to be used by motorists as their personal parking spaces!

Just look at the volume of cars parked along the LRT1 area, many jeepneys parked everywhere! Municipal mayors should look into the bigger picture that many of their residents are using the roads for parking space.  And barangay officials can’t contain the situation because they’d lose votes or maybe even they are one of the residents who park their cars on the streets thus making the roads narrow and a few accessible roads for motorists to use.

LTRFB should also put “own garage” as a factor before they give license plates to car owners.  Mind you, many people have two cars without even having their own garage.  MMDA, Metro mayors and LTRFB should work hand in hand to fix these problems.  It’s quite simple.  Widen the roads by getting rid of cars parked along the road.  There’d be no need for truck bans because roads would be enough for all motorists to use.

Congestion in the ports is just a result of these heavy traffic problems.  And alongside these traffic problem is corruption problem. Congestion is not only about truck bans, it also include the “red tape” system in the BoC.  Accept it or not, containers vans pile up when “red tape money” is insufficient.  Businessmen with more money to pay some corrupt BoC personnel don’t experience their container vans being piled at the ports but those small to medium enterprise owners who don’t have money to “hasten” the release of their vans at the ports will wait for their turn until they have been put at the bottom of the list.

Every Filipino motorist knows the problem but we can’t accept the reason because maybe we are among those people who use Philippine roads for personal parking space.  Then we’d blame everything to the government, rising prices of goods, business dying, heavy traffic problems, but we can’t blame ourselves for contributing to the problem.  If we want to buy a car, prepare a garage first.  Then we’ll see, traffic problems will ease up.