Tuesday, July 10, 2007 Buses, not PUJs for Ban-Tal area?
CONSULTATIONS and studies on replacing public utility jeepneys (PUJs) with buses from the main thoroughfare in the Banilad and Talamban areas are underway.
Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña yesterday said he will start consulting homeowners in these areas on the possibility of replacing PUJs with buses, especially during rush hours.
In his news conference yesterday, Osmeña assured that PUJs will still be allowed to run but will be limited to the back streets and interior routes.
“It’s a clear situation where people are going to be unhappy. It’s something that will be implemented over a period of time because there’s a need to adjust... these are adjustments associated with growth. We will not phase out PUJs, we will just reassign them to other routes,” the mayor said.
Planning and Development Officer Nigel Paul Villarete will ask the City Traffic Operations Management (Citom) board tomorrow to commission a study on the plan.
This, he said, will reduce the number of vehicles using the area to 25 percent of the current volume.
A bus is equivalent to three to four PUJs in the streets, Villarete said, adding that the change will have an impact on improving traffic.
Talamban has four jeepney routes, with 410 units plying the 13 C travel line alone.
Told that PUJ operators will likely object and call the plan elitist, the urban planning officer said shifting to buses is a complex process that requires much consultation with stakeholders.
That is why discussions should be done before such radical shift will be implemented, he said.
“Give me a City in the world which developed without shifting to a more efficient mode of transportation? This is something which cannot be reversed and even stopped,” Villarete said.
“As the city develops, it needs to upgrade to a more mass-based transportation,” he added.
He said he could not do anything if the PUJ operators think that way, except to say that what he has in mind is the general welfare of the people.
“This is something that will happen anyway. We might as well talk about it now and discuss the possibility. They (operators) themselves might even be the ones to shift (to operating buses),” he said.
Villarete added that the people should take his proposal “on a positive note” since it is designed to help them in the long run.
Meanwhile, the mayor wants to regulate private vehicles on Gov. Cuenco Ave. and Talamban Road as a way of decongesting the main thoroughfare. That might mean banning private cars altogether during rush hour. Tricycles will also have to be eliminated by then.
“There’s a tendency for government to give higher priority to private cars. But now there should be a reversal, we have to be more restrictive on private vehicles. During rush hour, public vehicles will be given priority. Private vehicles will have to take the side roads,” he said.
He said it is high time that people prefer public transport like buses instead of using private vehicles.
The mayor is also considering lifting the ordinance that bans the construction of new schools in the downtown area, so school owners could transfer downtown instead of building schools in Banilad and Talamban.
Believing that schools started and aggravated traffic problems downtown, he banned the construction of new schools in the area in the ’90s.
Schools and the Carbon market, he said, “killed” downtown Cebu City since investors refrained from starting new businesses there because of traffic congestion.
“We made a special ordinance, no more schools were allowed downtown so we succeeded in dispersing schools to the north and south but it also created a situation where no one wants to invest downtown. Now, do we want Banilad to be another Colon St.?” the mayor asked.
Schools were not the only structures affected by the battle to solve the city’s traffic problem.
City Hall has also implemented a moratorium on projects from Banilad to Binaliw to “slow down” development in the Talamban cluster because of the traffic situation.
Osmeña has asked businessmen to instead invest in the south district to even development.
The mayor had said that if the traffic problem is not solved, property value in the Banilad-Talamban area will likely drop. (LCR/RHM)
