Covington: One-third/two-thirds

ON SUNDAY, Presidential Communications Operations Office head Herminio Coloma asked us, the media, not to be too hard on the new administration; to be fair and positive in our assessments of the recent ups and downs. Be like the Japanese, urges Herminio, where "Some companies celebrate their most successful failures where they learn valuable lessons."

Follow the Japanese example Herminio? Splendid idea. I look forward over the next few days to seeing and hearing of all those manic Manila police brasshats falling on their dress swords.

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On Thursday, front page stuff, wow, "Sidewalks to be cleared." Could this be true? That the city is going to clear the sidewalks of vendors? Make walking down Magsaysay a pleasure rather than an ordeal?

No. Sorry. Journalistic license. The old one-third/two-thirds rule will still be in place -- one-third of the sidewalk reserved for vendors, two-thirds for pedestrians.

This one-third/two-third rule is nonsense. Sidewalks are for pedestrians, not heaps of merchandise which inevitably spreads further than the one-third and usually onto the street. Sidewalk vendors pay no rent. They take trade from adjacent stores. They make a mess, tossing their garbage, and they're a nuisance - folks stopping to shop block the sidewalk obliging pedestrians to step into the highway which, considering jeepneys creeping alongside the kerb, is not a good idea.

Sidewalk vendors should be removed to the nearest public market. They won't go of course, market stalls cost money. Buhangin has a smart new covered public market -- half the stalls are vacant -- and yet already there are ramshackle informal stalls appearing on the opposite side of the road. I'll wager that they increase in number and eventually creep onto the new lane of highway concrete. I'll also wager that the barangay hall or city hall don't raise a finger to stop it.

Junk the one-third/two-third rule. It's not nice. It's not fair. Nobody (Apart from the vendors) likes it but the city doesn't have the backbone does it?

Also on Thursday came an editorial lauding the city's idea of building tenement blocks to house the city's burgeoning population of squatters.

Mmmm. Beware. Tenements don't always work. Tenement in many parts of the world conjures up a picture of vertical slums. Something has to be done to cope with the huge inflow of folks from the country who build any-old-how, any-old-where but tenements? There'll need to be a lot of strings attached (And what happened to Marcos' "Bliss" scheme?).

Lastly lastly and September brings us, in the upcoming Asian Bird Festival, an opportunity to witness, first hand, a bird prison. Wild birds incarcerated for life in iron cages instead of flying free in the wild.

I'll be going. With boltcutters.