“SESSION Road doesn’t belong to the businessmen of Session Road; it belongs to the city of Baguio,” Baguio-born Mike Pearson said in response to the pronouncements of at least two prominent business regarding the idea to ‘pedestrianize’ Baguio’s main thoroughfare Session Road.
Pearson, a direct descendant of an American family who settled in Baguio in the 1930s, was speaking during a meeting of about 25 businessmen purposely to compare notes on the ‘pedestrianization’ idea. Prominently led by book and school supplies store owner Nelia Cid, the group met at a nearby hotel fearing that the ‘pedestrianization’ of the city’s main thoroughfare will push them to bankruptcy and eventual extinction.
Baguio City Mayor Mauricio Domogan approved the nine-hour ‘pedestrianization’ of Session Road last January 27 as part of a forum called Recreating a People-Friendly Session Road held at the University of the Cordilleras. It lasted from 3 o’clock in the afternoon until midnight.
‘Pedestrianization’ proponents prefer to call it “opening Session Road to people”.
“Session Road is central business district; it is strictly for business, not for ‘pedestrianization’ . . . ‘predestrianizing’ is very idealistic but not applicable to Session Road,” said the elderly Cid. “We will be losing a lot of business or profit; Session Road is not meant for promenading but purely business and profit.”
“As President of the Session Road Business Association, I have to protect Session Road (from those wanting to kill our business),” she added.
“Session Road is not for people; it is for business! Improve Burnham Park (instead); Burnham Park is for people,” added burger chain franchisee, hotelier and grocery owner Mike del Rosario screamed in his usual world-class Toastmasters International’s decades of training in public speaking, as he turned the tables on former Baguio City Architect Joseph Alabanza, a ‘pedestrianization’ proponent who was present during the said meeting.
“We have to change and you have to be willing to accept change and you must be willing to try and keep an open mind because where we are now is going downhill and it is not just Session Road but the whole city,” Pearson told the dumbstruck group. “We are overpopulated; we have too much of everything that is not right.”
“We are going downhill,” he repeated. “Once upon a time, we are the third best city in our category in the Philippines; today, we are 21st among the twenty-five.”
“We have to change and the enemy is not SM,” he challenged his fellow businessmen. “SM came because we weren’t doing very well, we weren’t very organized.”
“Why do people go to SM? Because everything is there,” he said. “Even when it is raining, there are more people in SM than in Session Road; let us face the fact.”
“We have to clean up our own acts first and police ourselves and find a better way and get the whole of Session Road connected,” Pearson begged. “We really need to go to that direction.”
Pearson lamented that “tourists, foreigners, don’t feel comfortable (in Session Road) and people won’t come to Baguio because they feel they are not safe”.
He cited the stinking sewer along Session Road which “is from the tenants of Session Road dumping their things there at night”.
“Sidewalk vendors, all these things, would affect us all; there are some businesses on Session Road that have extended on the sidewalk,” he said. “We have to agree that we don’t find it acceptable.”
He added that some businesses are making money by allowing people sell on the sidewalks. “There are those bending the rules,” he said.
During the said meeting of the businessmen who find the ‘pedestrianization’ as a crazy idea, Alabanza assured them that “no definite decisions have been made insofar as (the ‘pedestrianization’ of) Session Road is concerned.”
“We will initiate a citizens’ participation in decision-making,” he said. “That is a very important component insofar as getting people interested, especially when they affects you or where you reside or where you do business and of course, the whole city of Baguio.”
He said that Session Road has become a mere passage way between the market and SM. “A glorified passage way,” he declared. According to him, ‘pedestrianizing’ would eventually “make Session Road a destination area and making it a destination area would mean that we will be attracting and keeping the pedestrians in Session Road and get them patronize the businesses in Session Road”.
“The intention is to make Session Road as dynamic as possible so that people are destined to go to Session Road and not destined to go to SM,” he said as he mourned how the city’s population has swelled.
“There are limits to growth; the carrying capacity of Baguio is lost,” he said.*
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