I BET, when the new town council was sworn in, you were looking forward to a change in the way the city ordered itself. I know I was.
On Tuesday, Deca Homes ran a full page ad for a giant new housing development in Barangay Tigatto out Mandug way. "Barely 10 kilometers away from the heart of Davao City," gushed the ad, "and there is already an existing PUJ route serving the area."
True. But what the ad failed to mention is that the only road to Tigatto and Mandug and this splendid new subdivision is a strip of concrete 10 feet wide and some of it in appalling condition. Indeed, some of the hill-climbing sections are threatening to collapse into the valley below at the passing of the next 10-wheeler.
Two thousand lots, Deca says. Two thousand families. Around 10,000 souls given the sizeof the average Filipino family and all traveling on that single strip of crumbling concrete.
Is the city planning to refurbish the existing road? Construct a new road? It's Cabantian all over again, the city giving the go-ahead to massive development without a thought to the transport infrastructure required.
And, of course, all that new traffic will come to a grinding halt at Buhangin where an out of control population of parked trisikads and habal-habals is reducing the new four lane highway to its original two. City planning? 'Tis the same old story.
I liked Sunday's headline, "Water shortage likely to happen here: DCWD." but "No, we're not going to introduce mega-rates to water-wasters like car washes and we're certainly not going to suggest to the City Council that it introduces legislation obliging subdivision developers to incorporate in their houses rainwater harvesting and storage facilities (Like the huge new Deca developments where the rainwater run-off will be enormous).
Around Wednesday we learnt that at last Mindanao was to be mapped and a series of 1/50,000 sheets to be published, a project which will take a couple of years.
And, naturally, there were whiners and whingers who stood up with "concerns" about security and privacy and so on. Don't these people realise that a good base map - and a topographical map is just that - has so many uses I couldn't possibly list them in this column; that a map is the start of just about anything and everything? Get it done, the whole of Mindanao will benefit (And let's not make comparisons with Google Earth which is very nice but it is NOT a map).
Lastly lastly and this week's joke comes from the 1993 Tom Hanks/Denzel Washington film "Philadelphia" (Recommended).
Q: What do you call a thousand lawyers chained together at the bottom of the ocean?
A: A good start.