The EDSA experiment (Sabong News)
Author
Jullie Y. Daza
Date
APRIL 02 2022
There’s a new man at MMDA and he’s about to take your breath away (if not your car).
Chairman Don Artes has two options added to the current EDSA protocol. One of them would keep private cars off EDSA two days of the week. The other invokes “daylight-saving time,” reporting for work at 7 a.m. and going home at 4 p.m., not the same as NEDA’s suggestion of a 10-hour four-day work week. The third option is odd-and-even coding.
If you scan the details of the proposals in one go, you’re sure to get a headache, but that’s why people like you and me could never be boss of an entity that manages our comings and goings six days of the week. Under Chairman Artes’ plan, Wednesday would be the no-coding day. Wednesday, Baclaran day? Or because it’s mid-week? In the old days, recalling that memorable EO signed by President Erap, Saturday was exempted from number-coding for the simple reason that people have lots of errands to carry out on the weekend.
Comes now another experiment. It’s been 30 years since President FVR assigned a police general, Florencio Fianza, to decongest EDSA. That was five presidents ago, and still the Fianza experiment is an ongoing experiment, what used to be known as UVVRP — unified vehicle volume reduction program, per government’s penchant to not call a spade a spade.
Over the years — two generations! — there were several attempts to fine-tune, calibrate, modify, improve, tweak UVVRP, but they all fell by the highwayside. Fianza’s number coding scheme, which many people insisted on calling color-coding, was the best Metro Manilans could bear with and suffer in silence, but it was better than most of its descendants (including that harebrained scheme to set aside one lane on EDSA for HOV’s, or high occupancy vehicles, 99.9 percent of which sport tinted screens and windows).
An unintended consequence of UVVRP was the unforeseen (really?) increase in the number of private vehicles bought by the affluent and the working rich not so much to outsmart MMDA as to make the lives of their passengers easier. Or what’s money for?
If MMDA can afford it, why not bring Fianza back for another wild ride? To punish or reward him, you decide.
