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Monday, July 07, 2003
Amante: Park avenue clampdown
By ISOLDE D. AMANTE
HALFWAY up the Petronas Towers of Kuala Lumpur, the view from the walkway is dominated by a large, green park with vast pools and a dancing fountain. Even from that height, the park is clearly alive, filled with pedestrians. “Where are all the cars?” I asked the guide. “Underground,” he said, “in the four-story parking building under the park.”
Whenever I’m forced to drive around a block three times to find a parking slot I can squeeze into, I think of that park. And now that the Cebu City Government wants to start clamping illegally parked vehicles again, I fear it won’t be long before I write letters asking Mahathir Mohammad to consider retiring in the Philippines, as traffic and urban planning consultant.
Don’t get me wrong, I have no problems with the clamping ordinance. Some lawyers might see it as legalized extortion and theft: the ordinance authorizes traffic enforcers to hold your vehicle hostage, until you cough up the P500 administrative fine and pay for all other fines you’ve accumulated. I’ll leave the lawyering to lawyers. As long as I steer clear of no-parking zones, I figure that newly resurrected ordinance shouldn’t be much of a problem.
Of course, it would help if the City Government keeps its signage clear and teaches its enforcers to act humanely. If you’re ill, for example, and forced to stagger into an emergency room for oxygen, the traffic enforcer should at least be smart enough to tow your car away from the parking space reserved for the ambulance—instead of clamping it.
But if City Hall officials are serious about putting an end to illegal parking, they should assure motorists that they’re capable of more than clamping. For starters, how about making sure that buildings abide by parking space requirements set by a local ordinance?
What’s missing is an assurance that the clampdown on illegal parking is only part of a larger plan—one that includes, say, improving public transport to a level that even car owners would rather take the bus than drive.
Such a plan wouldn’t be complete without efforts to create a better urban environment conducive to walking and cycling. It isn’t so bad in the Cebu Business Park, or that stretch of Osmeńa Blvd. leading to the Provincial Capitol. Here, at least, you can walk in the shade and not worry about getting mugged or falling into an open manhole.
Carbon and Colon do have their attractions—pirated discs, dirt-cheap handbags and the medicine man’s sales pitch among them—but the fun of searching for the sidewalk wears off rather quickly.
Part of the problem is that while some of the world’s most livable cities are learning to use cars less, we keep buying cars here.
Take Copenhagen. In the 1960s, worried about how Danes were embracing “the values of isolated homes and everyone driving,” the authorities took pains to make people want to go out into the streets again, “while making it simultaneously more difficult to go there by car,” wrote the urban planner Peter Newman.
Here’s how they did it: the amount of space for car parking was reduced by three percent each year, and streets were designed chiefly for pedestrians, not car owners. It took 20 years to change the community’s car-dependent mindset.
In Singapore, car ownership comes with heavy taxes. Charges are collected from owners of cars entering the city center, except if they car-pool.
What’s important, says Newman, is to make sure that traffic managers prioritize children and citizens who cannot afford or do not want to use cars.
Cars, for all the convenience they offer, disperse and disrupt: they do not encourage community life the way a clean, tree-lined street with safe sidewalks can. Nowhere is the gap between the haves and have-nots more pronounced than when a beggar taps your windshield for your loose change.
Starting today, it would be laudable if City Hall can clear the streets of illegally parked cars. But the real accomplishment would be if City Hall can actually make us want to get out of our cars and, on foot, discover the city again.
(ida@sunstar.com.ph.) |
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