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Tuesday, August 23, 2005
Obenieta: Blind curves
By Myke U. Obenieta
So to speak
Even though his head was squashed to a pulp, a victim of a vehicular accident had to get up. Because his own mess mortified him, the unfortunate man had no other choice but to hunker down and pick up, bit by bloody bit, the remains of his brain.
Horrible, true. But, as far as sick jokes go, the foregoing gag does stretch the borders of black humor.
Why, in this country where anything goes, it wouldn’t be too farfetched if our streets would soon be renamed in honor of slapstick comedians. That would make sense, come to think of it, where there’s no dearth of anecdotes to amuse even the existentialists. Like the rib-tickling shaggy-dog story, for instance, about infrastructure projects passed off as politicians’ proof of affection to the electorate even if these were squeezed out of taxpayers’ sweat.
We wouldn’t have minded getting our legs pulled or being taken for a ride if those odiously ostentatious notions from our so-called leaders would also spell out suggestions, for example, on how to solve any of the country’s woes, particularly the oil crisis and its consequence— the skyrocketing cost of basic commodities.
Indeed, the green light is on for shortsightedness, if one is not seeing red.
That explains why Councilor Edgardo Labella— one of the few exception to the rule of public servants as a species who often end up with their heads between their legs after falling flat on their faces— is shaking his head at the desperate tack against the rising cost of fuel by leapfrogging the use of bicycles as an alternative mode of transportation.
A joke, or so it seems to Labella in the face of some eye-popping fact: Because the city has no bicycle lanes, riders currently use sidewalks and main streets, even occupying middle lanes supposedly designated for fast moving vehicles.
“Bicycles tend to mess up with the flow of traffic since vehicles are either forced to slow down or initiate cutting moves to avoid bumping the foot-pedaled bicycles,” Labella groans.
While the bike is generally considered as a safe means of transportation, “a cursory inspection on the daily traffic landscape of the city unravels some horrifying road scenes” like bicycles zigzagging between vehicles and even occupying the fast lanes.
At night, he avers, “several are seen without reflectorized gadgets or signal lights to warn drivers and pedestrians.”
Get real, that’s what he wants the Cebu City Traffic Operations Management (Citom) so it would “start devising measures to keep bicycles and other motorists safe.”
That, however, entails another scratching at the scalp. According to Labella, not only does City need to spend “to modify the current streets and sidewalks, it has to spare space for the purpose.”
Then again, that’s harder to see happening in the immediate future where good intention and good sense seldom go with each other’s flow.
(August 23, 2005 issue)
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