Bashing Manila

Manila is the place Cebuanos love to hate. The “imperial” capital has siphoned the region’s money in the name of the national budget. At the time when Cebuano was actually more widely spoken, it imposed a “national” language based on Tagalog. Its TV networks give more air time to showbiz and the traffic situation in EDSA than the more tragic news in the south. It forces the rest of the nation to watch crappy movies in the yearly Metro Manila Film Festival, when, as the name suggests, it is anything but national. It makes fun of us when we speak Tagalog with a Cebuano accent and typecasts the Bisaya as “tsimay” or unsophisticated “promdi”.

The list can go on. All of us return from a visit in Manila with horrible stories about taxi drivers, flooded streets, crowded trains and traffic jams. We talk about how unlivable the metropolis is, how expensive its lifestyle, how plastic its people. Bashing is our revenge.

I have my own stories of dishonest taxi drivers in Manila. My own first impressions of the megacity are easily spoiled the moment I hop into a cab at the airport. I always end up quarreling with the driver and swearing never again to take a taxi when I’m there.

Instead, I ask my brother to send his driver to pick me up. Or I tried to avoid these problems by learning to commute without a taxi. If I arrived by boat, for example, I’d walk a little bit away from the pier area to get a jeepney to bring me to the nearest LRT or MRT station.

I can go to my usual haunts faster with the train, except that recently it has become too crowded; you practically rub each other’s sweat and sniff each other’s armpits during rush hours. I am trying to learn riding the bus, which can either be too fast or slow (unlike the train, it can be caught in the traffic jam) and riskier (I never sat in a Manila bus without thinking of bombings and robberies).

But my recent trips there have made me realize how Manila is actually trying to improve. I discovered, for example, that one need not take a cab at all from the airport. There’s an air-conditioned bus that takes you to EDSA for only P20. That’s much better than walking far from the airport with  bulky luggage to find a jeepney or calling my brother at 6 a.m.  (as we usually take the cheaper early flight).

The metropolis is experiencing a building boom, especially in Taguig where my brother lives. Taguig city is fast becoming the new business center with more and more companies moving in from Makati, attracted by better infrastructure, housekeeping, and less corruption.

I walked around Bonifacio High Street recently and was impressed by how clean the roads are, some of which are paved with permeable stones. There are colorful playgrounds, reflecting ponds, musical fountains and interactive public art installations in beautifully landscaped parks. One street is lined with trees whose trunks are tied with colorful laces . It looks like you’re in some page of a children’s book.

In this same place where you see the playground and whimsical sculptures, interactive garbage bins (I didn’t really try them but they look like they talk to you when you drop something) are decorated with colorful cartoon drawings.

Some cities are also trying to re-green. In Makati, fences dividing roads are turned into colorful vertical gardens that help ease not only visual stress but also air pollution. Solar panels power CCTV cameras and electric lamps of streets and inside tunnels.

In Taguig, sleek electric tricycles owned by City Hall offer free rides to residents. Makati also has its own public e-jeepneys. Following Muntinlupa, other cities now ban plastic bags and require the use of brown paper bags in shopping malls and markets.

Bicycle lanes and a system of affordable bike rentals reduced motor traffic and vehicular accidents in UP Diliman. Some streets are declared jogging zones and are closed in certain days. The university also just recently conducted a dry run of its first driver-less monorail which is proposed to replace the “ikot” jeepney loop in the campus.

But the biggest surprise for me is seeing the public bike system introduced recently by the Metro Manila Development Authority across Ayala Center. This allows people to use the bikes for free in the fenced bike lane from Ayala to Magallanes.

I heard that this system of public bikes and bike lanes will soon be expanded in the metropolis to deliberately discourage car use and to make biking a practical commuting alternative. Soon, they will also be introducing a bus rapid transit similar to that recently acquired by the Cebu City government  until now has yet to operate (Perhaps the mayor is afraid of losing votes from the sector of the jeepney drivers who might be affected.)

More Cebuanos are buying cheap surplus bikes and using them on the road. But  City Hall has not supported them by installing a system of bike lanes. In the meantime, we bash Manila for its traffic jams and other problems. Yet we forget to fix our own.