THE Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA) recently stated that currently, about 464,000 motor vehicles ply EDSA daily, almost twice its intended capacity of 250,000 vehicles.
This means there are more cars on the road than our highways can accommodate, causing a major blockage in the flow of traffic. Edsa is choking, and all the currently implemented solutions are mere palliatives — more for PR than actual remediation.
But why is EDSA choking?
Let me point this out: The northern and southern parts of Metro Manila are separated by the Pasig River. It cuts across from Cainta and Marikina all the way to Manila Bay. This river effectively divides north and south Metro Manila.
There are only about five bridges that cross the Pasig River, allowing travel between north and south: EDSA Guadalupe, C5 Pasig, Makati-Mandaluyong, the bridge at Rockwell, and Nagtahan Bridge in Manila. Yes, there is Jones Bridge, but that doesn’t count for our purposes since it only crosses from Intramuros to Chinatown.
Considering that Metro Manila has about 1.5 million motor vehicles, plus an additional half a million from outlying provinces — places like Bulacan, Pampanga, Cavite, Laguna, Rizal and Batangas, where people commute daily to work in the metro — you can imagine the pressure on our streets to accommodate all these vehicles.
On top of this, we have business districts scattered all over the metro: the government offices in Quezon City, the business districts in Ortigas, Libis, Taguig, Makati and now along Macapagal Boulevard by Manila Bay.
All these people travel between offices and districts in their cars, and in practice, only two bridges are regularly used to cross the Pasig River: the EDSA Guadalupe Bridge and the C5 Pasig flyover.
How can two bridges — one with six lanes in each direction and the other with two lanes in each direction — serve over a million vehicles every day?
Adding to the problem is that the Rockwell and Makati-Mandaluyong bridges both end at smaller roads — funnels, you might say — which only intensify the traffic jams during rush hours.
What the government should be doing is building more bridges across the Pasig River. If there are roads facing each other from across the river, a bridge should be constructed so cars don’t have to detour to EDSA or C5 just to achieve a simple crossing.
Metro Manila traffic has now become an exercise in mental gymnastics and route analysis for every Filipino motorist. Just getting from one meeting to the next drains the energy we need to be truly productive.
And the solution is quite simple: build a bridge wherever roads meet across the river. What’s there to think about?
