MMDA: Edsa travel time cut by nearly half hour

PHOTO by ARNOLD ALMACEN/INQUIRER

While this holiday season saw an additional 11,000 vehicles ply the major thoroughfare of Edsa, the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA) on Friday said that the traffic situation is still “better” now compared to last year’s.

Based on the MMDA’s traffic survey that was released Friday, travel time from Roxas Boulevard to Monumento and vice versa was significantly cut down by almost half an hour.

On Thursday, it took a vehicle 1 hour and 10 minutes to traverse the entire stretch of Edsa at a speed of 19.54 kilometers per hour. Compared to Dec. 22 last year, the same vehicle took 1 hour and 39 minutes to traverse Edsa at 13.91 kph.

MMDA officer in charge and general manager Tim Orbos said that this was despite the fact that there are now 357,529 vehicles plying Edsa, which is 11,499 higher than last year’s.

Orbos attributed the improvement in traffic along the perennially congested Edsa to the public’s “continuous support, understanding and cooperation” with the various traffic-reduction schemes that their agency initiated and implemented over the last few months.

“With Christmas just around the corner and when traffic is expected to be heaviest during the holidays in almost all major thoroughfares in Metro Manila, the cooperation of the public and private sectors has been vital in improving the traffic flow,” Orbos said.

He also commended drivers for slowly bringing back discipline in the roads, as they continued to follow traffic regulations even after the removal of several barriers and delineators in certain portions of Edsa.

“Even without the barriers, motorists still followed traffic rules, particularly in the Yellow Lane, which is exclusively for public passenger buses,” he said.

Orbos, however, maintained that despite the improvements, much is still needed to be done in the portion of Edsa near Balintawak and Pasay Rotonda, where transport terminals and sidewalk vendors abound.

Pending Congress’ granting of emergency powers to the Duterte administration to solve the country’s transportation woes, the MMDA, as part of the Interagency Council on Traffic, implemented and intensified traffic-reduction schemes such as the expanded no window hours policy for the number coding scheme, no weekday mall sales, and clearing of illegally parked vehicles and sidewalk vendors.

Recently, the MMDA also strictly enforced the nose-in, nose-out policy for provincial buses along Edsa. The same buses have also been banned from using the southbound lane of Timog to P. Tuazon in Quezon Cty from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. JE/rga