Southbound passengers raring to go home for the long weekend must have experienced flashes of déjà vu when personnel of the Cebu City Transportation Office led by Raquel Arce suddenly closed the van terminal along Junquera St. in Barangay Kamagayan on Friday, April 28, 2023.
For them, it was July 2015 all over again when the City Government under Mayor Michael Rama shut down the One Citilink Terminal after more than a decade of operation because the facility was operating without a mayor’s permit and it owed the City close to P13 million.
Both moves caught passengers, van operators and tenants by surprise.
Last Friday, the reasons Arce gave for closing the Kamagayan facility were that it was “unaccredited” and its operation violated Section 5b of City Ordinance 1958, dated 2003, which states that “no terminal shall be located within a radius of 300 meters from a block that includes the central downtown area.”
Valid enough reasons, I suppose, but I question the timing of the implementation.
Why on a Friday when many people are expected to go home to their hometowns? And why give van operators, vendors and passengers only 30 minutes to vacate the area?
According to a dispatcher, a daily average of 100 trips leave the terminal, and with each van carrying 18 passengers, that’s 1,800 passengers who were told to proceed to the accredited terminal in SM City Cebu or in Ayala at the Cebu Business Park.
How convenient then for the two malls to have so many potential customers right at their doorsteps. And on a payday. And how sad for small-time businesses in the downtown area that will suffer as a consequence.
Apparently, Rama doesn’t care about the latter because they are not owned by Metro Manila-based tycoons, his current favorite go-to to solve the City’s woes. And why would the mayor give a hoot about the passengers? Majority of them reside in the province and don’t vote in the city.
At the end of the day, he is doing the right thing, which is why I actually admire him, even though most of the time he doesn’t make sense when he opens his mouth to speak.
But what political will and what resolve. Take, for example, the demolition of structures along the city’s major waterways, which should have been done a long time ago, but only he has had the chutzpah to actually do it.
Finally, a politician who doesn’t care about the plight of the electorate but who only thinks about what is good for the city.
At any rate, Rama must be confident about his chances in the next election because he has no qualms about implementing orders that can be construed as “anti-poor.”