AS a Cebu City resident I wanted to ask some questions about last Sunday’s road share plan. This is pretty long but what the heck. First, aside from securing a permit from the Cebu City government, by what authority are the organizers vested with that empowers them to tell the city residents to adjust to their road share experiment so they can examine, in their own words, how commuters and public utility vehicle drivers react when the existing road network are constricted according to their group’s parameters and specifications? Second, is there any form of accountability on their part if something goes wrong with their experiment which, even if it had the seal of approval from the city government, doesn’t mean that it secured permission from the riding public who were greatly inconvenienced the first time with their second “Road Revolution” experiment? I would guess that approval of the permit carries with it certain conditions that should be complied with by the organizers, the Movement for Livable Cebu, and that approval of that permit was fast-tracked upon orders of Cebu City Mayor Michael Rama and that these conditions should serve as an accountability check on their part. May we the city residents know what these conditions are or have city officials simply given them free rein to conduct their activity as they see fit? Third, what are their safeguards in the event something goes horribly wrong, like an accident or if by some chance, an ambulance is delivering a patient in need of emergency care, a motorist or a commuter figured in an accident and needs to go to the hospital only to be blocked by the constricted flow of vehicles on one side while on the other side, youths on bicycles, skateboards and what have you are frolicking and having fun on a wide open space with not a care in the world? That the wide open space should have been given to the commuters, who I think number more than motorists in Cebu City? I assume that approval of the permit to hold that road share experiment carries with it a requirement for some insurance that they would pay to the inconvenienced or affected motorists/commuters especially those who figure in the above-mentioned situations or would the organizers conveniently blame or pass on that responsibility to the city government? Fourth, have the organizers really done extensive consultations with the public transport sector, who lost a day’s wages after being inconvenienced by their Sunday stunt? More importantly have they really asked—by this I mean street level, house-to-house consultations--the riding public if they are agreeable to another round of their road share experiment again considering the inconvenience they experienced at their hands on the second Road Revolution? To the organizers, please don’t tell me that the riding public needs only to be conditioned (a term used by one radio host in support of the road share activity) to accept and adjust to your road share experiments so it would work beautifully according to your specifications. “Experiments”, “conditioning” –these are poor choice of words on your part and the part of your supporters. For me, it means someone or something is being experimented on without that person’s permission or without that person volunteering for the activity in the first place. These are questions which I don’t know will be answered adequately and frankly I don’t care whether or not they would be. What I do know is that last Sunday’s road share stunt and that transport holiday/rally of that militant transport group are activities best done someplace else where they cannot inconvenience the riding public (of course unless they are really after the publicity). One of the organizers said “if only for the long term gains of having better roads” or some words to that effect “four hours is nothing.” That makes their apologies sound both insincere and hollow because they think nothing of the inconvenience caused by their activity that they have imposed on the riding public. Since they said that they wanted to hold the road share experiment (that word again) to get hard data on the behavior of motorists, commuters, pedestrians and so on ad nauseum, I think they deserve to be asked the hard questions about who they are, by what authority are they vested with (Mega Cebu?) that empowers them to do this activity and whether they or the city government would be held accountable for whatever inconvenience their road share stunt may cause to the riding public in the future, to name a few. There, I’ve said my piece for now. Ill end na lang with a video about the one word theyve been telling to those who were inconvenienced by their Sunday road share stunt. youtube/watch?v=GeN_M9keIBY
Posted on: Thu, 02 Oct 2014 03:58:09 +0000
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