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Metro-Manila Traffic is not due to lack of discipline

Metro-Manila Traffic Chaos: Stop Blaming Motorists
Lack of discipline is actually a symptom, not the root cause.
Government has utterly failed to deliver on its responsibilities.

July 9, 2019—In a video making the rounds these days, we see an ambulance, with a patient who cannot breathe, stuck in traffic and unable to move towards the hospital.  Both sides of the street are clogged with traffic going in the opposite direction. The distress in the ambulance is evident.  A guard opens up some space and the ambulance crawls a few feet forward only to be stopped again and again.  This continues for some 8 minutes on the video.  The person taking the video, from the front passenger seat of the ambulance laments the terrible situation.  

Metro Manila Traffic July 2019

Just another day in Metro-Manila.  Photo by: James Mirasol, July 8, 2019

The knee-jerk reaction is to blame the counterflowing motorists as “lacking discipline” but that’s only looking at the surface of problem.  Ultimately the chaos is not so much the result of undisciplined motorists as it is the fundamental failure of the government to address the population’s most basic needs in the most densely-populated megacity on planet Earth. 

Overpopulation. No real public transport system.  Insufficient road networks. Woefully inadequate enforcement.  God-awful engineering that is in many cases downright dangerous. 

It’s time to stop blaming our neighbors and place the blame—and accountability—squarely where it truly belongs. Despite all of the taxes we pay, the redundant and conflicting regulations that we put up with, government—from barangay to city to provincial to national—at all levels have all failed to deliver the basic services that makes a city actually function.  Frustrating, infuriating traffic chaos is not a result of a lack of basic discipline on our neighbors' part so much as it is a failure of the government to effectively serve the taxpaying, hard-working citizens. Sadly, we have tolerated these failures and blamed each other for far too long.  Then again, maybe it is our fault, for we have failed to hold government accountable.

How many people have died because emergency services simply cannot get to and from sites due traffic?  How many more will die.  Because of traffic.  TRAFFIC. Let that sink in.