Trafficked idiocy

A BRILLIANT idea, I have to concede, is the rotunda traffic schema propounded by the Pampanga Chamber of Commerce and Industry Inc. (PamCham).

So breathtakingly brilliant that the city government of San Fernando and the Department of Public Works and Highways lost no time in enforcing it, on a three-day trial basis, sans any prior public notice.

The trial results though scratched all the sheen off PamCham’s brainchild. 

Chaotic is an understated description of the result of the first day of trial, March 29, a Saturday at that, with government offices closed for the weekend and with most schools already on summer vacation.

The traffic surge that swamped the rotunda-on-trial under the Dolores flyover at the junction of the Jose Abad Santos Avenue and MacArthur Highway only showed the impracticability, if not the impossibility, of the schema there.

The scene was straight out of those early silent movies – of the exasperated Keystone cops trying to restore order on roads gridlocked with all sorts of vehicles going in all directions. 

Ah, if only curses could burn, PamCham, DPWH and the city LGU would have been all cremated by early Sunday.

City Traffic Management Unit chief Pines Pineda tags the flaw in PamCham’s brilliant idea: “Because the earlier three lanes have been cut to two, there is a traffic build-up starting on the northern section of the city, particularly in the vicinity of St. Jude Village.” So was he quoted by Sun-Star Pampanga. Also, “many motorists were confused on which way to go, some taking counterflows that it took four traffic enforcers to guide them.”

Anybody other than an idiot and the kindred minds of PamCham, DPWH and the city LGU could have seen the deficiency in establishing a roundabout, yeah a rotunda is called that too, under the Dolores flyover. The space is just too scant, too cramped to allow the continuous flow of vehicles to and from multiple directions. The directional arrows in the tarpaulin placed at the rotunda site already shows this and bodes the ensuing confusion.  

Still, as Sun-Star Pampanga quoted Pineda: “It might be too early to see the effects of this rotunda. Personally, it might not be feasible. We would have to make adjustments and more social preparation. It might not apply locally, compared to those abroad. It will take discipline on the part of our motorists. But then again, we will have to observe and monitor the situation in the coming trial days.”

Why do I have this sense that Pineda knew the futility, if not the idiocy, of the rotunda but did not want to prick some bloated egos on the stupidity of their idea.

But the motorists’ uproar just would not die down.

“Rotunda trial fails.” So bannered Sun-Star Pampanga Monday. With the bullet: “Not feasible says traffic exec.” And reported:

The temporary rotunda put on trial and dry run Saturday afternoon altogether failed as personnel of the City of San Fernando’s Traffic Management Unit removed the concrete barriers under the Dolores flyover.

Early morning yesterday, TMU head Pines Pineda told Sun-Star Pampanga that the rotunda proposed by [PamCham] vice chairman Rene Romero was ‘not all feasible’…

“We decided to remove the barriers and put them back in place in the usual route. Judging from the results of the trial and dry run, we deemed it not possible to establish a permanent rotunda under the flyover,” Pineda said…

At least, the city government did not have to wait for the three-day trial to finish, calling it quits after but a day, seeing the folly of its, and PamCham’s, making. DPWH’s too.

What is really puzzling is how Mayor Edwin Santiago, an engineer by profession, could have been swayed to still go with this bird-brained scheme that is patently idiotic right on the very shit of a paper it was blueprinted on.

A source in the regional office of a national agency claimed that PamCham’s rotunda schema was instantaneously thumbed down when it was presented before the Regional Development Council, precisely owing to the constricted space where it was proposed to be set. How Santiago was convinced to still go with it can only be credited to the overpowering influence PamCham holds over him.

This does not augur well with Santiago’s masa image impacted in his Tsinelas ng EdSa campaign blurb. The reality in the EdSa administration is not “Fernandino  First” as sloganeered. It could very well be “PamCham Foremost.”

Finally, an unsolicited advice: If Santiago really, really wanted traffic congestion to ease in any part of his city, all he needed to do is cry “T-Mac” and let Angeles City’s Balibago village chief Tony Mamac do his own brand of gun-trafficking in the streets of San Fernando. As he famously did along MacArthur Highway in his barangay about two weeks ago.    

Reading, writing, being

THE SUN, the sea, the sand – and a book. My own summer fun.

The book though goes beyond the chaise lounge under some shady coconut palm and presents itself at the bedside table, study desk, bathroom shelf, staircase, office desk, car seat, bag, wherever I happen to be. No mere summer fare, reading has become an essential to my living, aye, to my being.

The voracious reader Ding Cervantes preaches the convenience of the tablet with its vast library of e-books, adjustable fonts, lightness of weight over the old hardbounds and paperbacks.

No tech-savvy like Ding, I prefer my books as they are – the smell of pulp actually an inducement to read, a stimulant to greater understanding, indeed, to internalizing both spirit and letter of the book.

To each his own preference, reading is its own reward anyways.

Comes to mind Francis Bacon’s Of Studies, thus: “Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.”

Impacted during my formative years at the Mater Boni Consilii Seminary, the best of Bacon’s Essays has since served as my reading beacon.  

In the choice of books, he cautions: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.”

Many times, a cursory browse of the teaser or gist in the flaps is all it takes to “taste” the book and finding it unsavoury promptly return it to the shelf.

Of the great finds – I read “wholly with diligence and attention” and re-read with greater diligence and interest. Sun Tzu’s Art of War, Machiavelli’s The Prince, The Confessions of St. Augustine, The Communist Manifesto, Pablo Neruda’s 20 Love Poems are among the most prized of my some 1,000 books.

It is to Bacon too that I owe this habit of reading three books at every sitting, categorized to heavy, light and inspirational. Currently I am into the thick of Fidel Castro’s spoken autobiography My Life, the atheist Chris Hitchens’ god is not Great subtitled How Religion Poisons Everything, and Paulo Coelho’s Manuscripts found in Accra.

Earlier were  American Lion of Andrew Jackson’s years  in the White House, a re-read of William Safire’s The First Dissident subtitled The Book of Job in Today’s Politics, and, to be finished yet,  Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror subtitled The Calamitous 14^th Century.

For inspirational, restful intermissions – from all the heavy reading – Rabindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali,  the poems of Rumi, and the Dhammapada, the Buddha’s Path of Wisdom I find most pleasing.

In the wake of Putin’s audacity (mis)addressing the crisis in Crimea, I am dusting off a biography of Stalin and the history of the Crimean War with Tennyson’s The Charge of the Lighjt Brigade on the side. Still remember, “…theirs not to make reply, theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die: into the valley of death rode the six hundred…”?

Obvious by now my preferred reads: history and biography, philosophy and poetry, morality and religion. Again, in submission to Bacon: “Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtle; natural philosophy deep; moral grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend.”

Alas, the last fling I had with mathematics was in third year high school trigonometry. The only connection to the subject now exclusive with my Tokyo-based actuarial specialist son Jonathan.

Wise. Witty. Subtle. Deep. Grave. Not only able to contend but contentious even. The fruits of reading, the very requisites to writing. One who rarely reads but appends “writer” to his name is no more than a pompous pretender then. Not unlike the idiot who thinks anyone who can read his mail is a man of letters.

Bacon, fittingly: “Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. And therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit: and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know, that he doth not.”

So I read. So I write. So I am.