You’re looking for a named person? Most people would blame a succession of administrative decisions over a number of years that either made little impact, or had a good intention but were not thought through.
Take the coding of cars in metro manila, for example - each car has a code that determines which day it cannot be driven. This of course would lead to a reduction in traffic if it were not for the fact that getting a second car with a different coding is easy (and in fact now quite cheap). This then means that a family with two cars could drive both at the same time for 5 days of the week, and still drive one or the other on the sixth and seventh. In effect it doubled the traffic for 5 days and kept it the same for the other two. It’s a great example of a good intention that failed to have the desired impact. It’s also not easy to now fix that… the stable door was opened, the horse has gone.
Another factor is the heat. Most people would prefer to sit in an air conditioned vehicle than walk. If there is no air con, then any vehicle with a breeze running through it would be better than walking. It’s not a thing to blame on any one person, it’s a fact of life in the tropics. Rather than walk to the mall, a lot of people will prefer to drive. I live around Makati and when it’s cool enough I’ll walk happily between Greenbelt and Century malls. But it’s an unusual thing to do - the habit is to drive, this increases pollution and makes the walk unpleasant… so it’s a vicious circle. Equally, I’ll walk between air conditioned outlets, finding routes that avoid direct sunlight and where possible, are indoors. That’s not always possible and even a short walk in direct sunlight can lead to an unpleasant level of perspiration. If you’re heading to a meeting on a day that’s hot, and hope to get there nice and crisp, you’ve got to get a car.
Infrastructure - road systems - evolve over time. There are plans for new links and the latest freeway link has just opened, reducing travel along to C5 to a fraction of what it used to be. However, the density of the buildings and the crucial nature of the current routes means it is hard to find a way to divert traffic whilst major roads are built or improved. Any delay to the main routes means gridlock… it’s easy to blame the government for this, but in fact it has happened over a seriously long time, so once again it is a failing of multiple administrations.. no one person is to blame.
There are plans for new rails, new styles of Jeepney, new road links around the airport in Manila… and the intention right now is to ‘build build build’. Let’s hope that comes to fruition in a meaningful sense.
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