Livable wish list

The initial survey conducted by the civil society group Movement for Livable Cebu (MLC) listed several items that Cebuanos felt should be present in a metropolis like Cebu City.

Affordable food, clean air, accessible and adequate health care, good schools, low crime and low or zero pollution make up what Cebuanos call a livable city.

The number one complaint of Cebuanos or at least Cebu City residents is that it’s becoming crowded. With the growing influx of people from the countryside wishing to make a living in the big city only to wind up as squatters or adverse occupants in rivers and every nook and cranny in the metropolis, that comes as no surprise.

The movement also voiced surprise and disappointment over President Benigno Aquino III’s position that flyovers are a viable solution to the city’s traffic congestion, although he qualified that statement by saying that if there are other alternative solutions, he’s open to it.

The President issued that statement more as a show of public support to Rep. Tomas Osmeña rather than congressional candidate Raul del Mar, the principal mover behind the flyover projects, since he followed it up by chiding Mayor Michael Rama’s opposition to the flyover projects.

The MLC’s survey is but a wish list of items they want delivered to the President and concerned agencies and while it’s nice the cold hard fact remains that all of it will cost something which the national government, whose constituency is nationwide, cannot fund overnight. It’s assumed that the group knows this.

While insisting that they have obtained outputs from some of Cebu City’s finest engineers, urban planners and developers, we wonder if the movement also took the time to place price tags on each and every item on the wish list, or if they relegated that task to the government agencies.

For all their criticism of Osmeña, the congressman was astute enough to accept President Aquino’s position that the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system cannot be financed fully because it remains untried even if other countries like Colombia managed to implement it effectively.

The congressman even proposed that the BRT be implemented in phases, first covering the Capitol area to see if it would work better than the Light Railway Transit being lobbied by Rep. Eduardo Gullas of Cebu’s 1st district.

The MLC and its supporters, we assume, are also realistic enough to know that all the items on their wish list cannot be done even within a decade unless they also have massive private sector on their side to complement government support.

Flared intersections may be cheaper than flyovers—we hope the group also included in their estimates ancilliary costs like affected residents or businesses etc.—but they still cost a lot and more private sector involvement is needed if flyover opponents and eventually the public want to build what they consider to be a sustainable, livable Metro Cebu.