Sunday, June 15, 2008 Sun.Star Essay: Trouble in passage By Erma M. Cuizon
THERE was a time when office workers would go home for lunch, take a quick nap, then go back to office for the afternoon session. That one aspect of Cebu’s lifestyle is a thing of the past, say, in the ‘60s and earlier. These days, no more home at lunch to Grandma’s loving cooking.
Life isn’t the same anymore and the culprit of change is traffic. It is traffic that makes the difference now. A Manilan friend says it takes almost three hours for him to drive from Malate to UP. He could come to Cebu and arrive at the Cebu airport in just over an hour. But add about half an hour or more to this time for the drive from the airport to the hotel. Well, still less than three hours, it is.
That dream time of lunch at home between work, at least in Cebu, was no longer in Manila in the ‘60s. There was one instance when we got trapped in traffic just before entering Buendia. Inside one single short road perpendicular to Buendia, we were stuck for 30 minutes!
It was because in both ends of the road were crossings that the traffic cops couldn’t handle. The guys in the cars next to ours got down and walked to the corners to find out why we were stuck. The guy in the car ahead of us squatted outside his car smoking, holding himself back, restless, set to blow up.
Imagine how many people in that single road missed an appointment, how many kids were late for school.
A friend’s memory of school as a kid in Metro Manila is getting up very early in the dark of dawn to be ready for the long ride with the bad traffic to school from Malate to Maryknoll College in Quezon City. She grew up with a memory of being unwilling to get up, dreaming through her bath with the mother handling it, then being dressed up to the socks while lying down, refusing to eat breakfast, falling back to sleep in the car and the long drive to school.
It’s really not this bad in Cebu, but we can’t afford to bide for time until we say, “What a traffic!” Besides, we already have the signs of a busting metropolis. This is the reason why they’re building a flyover in the Banilad-Talamban road. It’s one place in this growing city which, like a few others, is considered in a “congestive condition,” as construction people put it.
So in our life, we don’t only have “traffic” as a word that Grandma never heard of, we also have bypass, overpass, flyover, and these are terms that are part of day-to-day living.
A bypass is a highway that’s built away from town so that the traffic from one town to another flows without the interference of the local transport activities in a town. The world’s first bypass was in Italy in an ancient place called Terracina where you still see Roman numerals carved into the rock.
An overpass, on the other hand, converts, say, an ordinary two-lane passage into a four-lane (or more) road or highway up and over the original other. A pedestrian overpass is for pedestrians who cross safely above vehicular traffic.
A flyover is an overpass but called as such in Britain and most Commonwealth countries. It could also refer to a bridge or railway. In North America, it’s a high-level overpass---meaning it’s an overpass built over another overpass, can you imagine more of these over the others?
If anyone gets to discover a way for us to fly, then we jump from one overpass to another. And we’d get to use more transport construction terms than what we know now---like extra ramp, interchange, cloverleaf loop, beltway.
Meanwhile, we have to solve the Ban-Tal flyover problem of a flyover being built while the daily motions of human beings in a busy part of the city must go on, flyover or none. So Rep. Raul del Mar said that during the construction, “never will we allow a road to close.”
The construction of the 290-meter P86.9-million flyover started on Feb. 1 and everyone panicked over what to do with the daily traffic, the old problem made worse by the way the construction site hugs the area….
