Sun.star essay: Roads in our life

Sunday, September 11, 2011

HOUSE girl Ana was only 8 years old when she’d travel with her father and some members of the family from Balamban town of Cebu province eastward across the province to Cebu City.

No, they didn’t ride a bus, they walked. It was an alternative, cheaper and shorter travel from the town to Cebu City. A trip up northeast and then down on the west side to the city would have taken days. There was no Transcentral Highway then.

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Where the dirt roads exactly were in relation to the highway now, Ana can’t say. She
doesn’t remember seeing any vehicle passing by as they walked. Probably, she says, there weren’t roads as she knows a road today.

It would be less than a decade after when the Highway was built to connect Balamban to Barangay Busay in Cebu City.

Now at 21, Ana remembers how the family would start walking out at dawn on the dirt road (perhaps also on pathways only) throughout the day until night.

She must have enjoyed the trips so much that she doesn’t remember the walk to be very hot in summer, there were trees for cover and it was cool nearest the sky.

They’d reach the Tops in the evening which overlooked the city in lights (2,000 feet above sea level). It was also there that they’d see vehicles; she swears she saw no vehicles in their walk. They’d move on then in the dark to Laguerta, Busay in Lahug where the family still lives.

And I remember what columnist Godo Roperos told me about how Balambanons in the west (where he comes from) would take a long, slow trip years ago to Cebu City through pathways across, to Liloan in the east side of the province. It was in Liloan and in the city that he built his family.

Ana still goes home to Balamban when she’s given a leave from her work. Today, there are v-hires or habal-habal motor rides from Lahug in Cebu City westward to Balamban.

You can take a bus trip of two hours, if fast. If slow, it would take an hour more, she calculates. The habal-habal ride is faster, she says. But it’s “sakit, kapoy, hapdos sa lubot,” she laughs.

Stories of trips connecting Balamban to the west of the province across brings to mind stories of roads—pathways or streamlined strong roads, the ones as durable as history, as what the Romans built centuries ago which are still in use today.

Like Ana, we deal with roads every day of our lives. The reality of roads—their rush and flow, the push, the pull—affect our day. Roads aren’t just structures we deal with once a week but every day and forever. Any idea of solutions to transport problems should be carefully studied as though the matter is of life.

Roads, at first, were not constructed as we know them. In ancient Egypt, they were spot on land which became roads from over-use of the same paths. The ground became packed in and solid.

Romans knew the importance of roads in 500 BC. They were useful in trade, even in the movement of the armies in Italy. The government set up 400,000 kilometers of road, over 80,000 of them paved.

Years after, say in 45 BC, there were more roads in Rome, but also more travelers (traffic problems) so that all vehicles were banned from within the city, also in other Italian cities; even horses were disallowed. They were allowed in only at night.

We have the same problems in Cebu City, increase of road users. Ownership of vehicles in Cebu City grew by 60 percent in six years from 1993 to 1999.

There is a story of roads in our life—how they used to be, how they are now as built and rebuilt, and how much a part of our culture they are, like Colon.

Should we cover them with overpasses?

There’s no harm in undertaking a master plan to find out if we need more overpasses or if there are other ways to solve traffic problems. An overpass is a flyover, flyby, flypast. From a high building, look down on flyovers and listen to a kid telling his mother, “Look, ma, the roads are flying!”

(ecuizon@gmail.com)