The nightmare
before Christmas

The Yuletide season of 2014 should be marked as the time we killed one of our outstanding competitive advantages: order in our roads, our ability to keep traffic flowing.

The holidays were marked with horrendous traffic jams, capped by the spectacular Dec. 23 gridlock in our streets when the entire city from north to south, including its secondary arteries were paralyzed. It was, simply put, a nightmare.

With this, Bacolod has now joined the list of urban centers that cannot control the flow of cars and other vehicles, when travelling from one point to another now took more than the usual.

It is not a honorific list by the way. With the breakdown of order in our streets, we are now forced to change our lifestyles the way those living in Metro Manila do: leave the house early, or keep appointments in one place, or better yet, stay at home altogether.

I wonder how much business we lost with the terrible traffic we had for the holidays. For example, someone asked me to buy James Ham for her, and going to that store, which is way far away from downtown where traffic jams usually are, I also got stuck in another monstrous maze. After 20 minutes in this, I took the first detour I saw and did not go back anymore. Just how many people detoured away from their planned businesses, big and small, we wouldn't exactly know for sure. The crowds, after all, were still there for cash registers to jiggle. But think: it would have been more if traffic wasn't so bad.

Also, there were plenty of visitors during the holidays who would have been enticed to invest in our city but are now having second thoughts after getting trapped in those traffic jams. One balikbayan friend who is retiring a few years from now said that after experiencing the traffic jams in our city, he is now looking at Dumaguete as the place to spend his retirement in quiet and calm.

So, yes, this traffic problem is more than just about frazzled nerves and rising tempers; it is about how we are perceived as an investment area. Look, instead of writing about Yuletide cheers and warm wonderful holiday wishes, here I am crying out loud like a bitter old bitch. And given the feedback I have been getting over the traffic columns, I can say this problem has made plenty of bitter old bitches during the holidays. We're not the Grinches who stole Christmas; on the contrary, the traffic problem stole Christmas from us.

And then our Bacolod Traffic Authority went on television to tell us that the traffic mess of Dec. 23 was partly caused by the absence of traffic enforcers because they, too, were on vacation leave. We knew the holidays would bring all these cars out, and we allowed those enforcers to go on leave? And if we allowed them to go on leave, we did not make provisions for their replacement? It was like they shut down the hospitals because the doctors and nurses wanted to celebrate Christmas, too.

The same skewered logic is applied to the other reasons for the problem. We won't clean the streets because our hearts bleed for these Yuletide entrepreneurs who now occupy our streets, the small people who eke out holiday money from the holiday commerce: the young coconut vendors, the fruit sellers, even the bread hawkers.

I am all for helping people earn something more, especially the small ones who cash in on the opportunities presented by the season. But, by golly, can't we give this to them without compromising the rest of our city and its future?*

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