Expert wants transpo and traffic management plan for Baguio

(Originally published in the April 1-7, 2012 issue of the Baguio Chronicle ---

a weekly newspaper based in Baguio City, Philippines ---

by Sly L. Quintos, Associate Editor.)

AN associate professor at the Department of Civil Engineering of the Saint Louis University this week is pushing for a Traffic Impact Assessment Study and eventually come up with a long-term Transportation and Traffic Management Plan for Baguio City.

Mark de Guzman, who holds a PhD in Civil Engineering degree from the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City, said vehicular and pedestrian congestion have been choking Baguio and that “we need to do a definite traffic and transportation plan”.

Speaking during last week’s Kapihan at the Philippine Information Agency (PIA) Cordillera regional offices, de Guzman lamented that the present traffic and transport system of Baguio “is mostly experimental in nature and we are not sure if the system would last to five up to ten years viz-a-viz the growing volume of cars and human population”.

The proposed Traffic Impact Assessment Study and the eventual Transportation / Traffic Management Plan has been estimated (in 2010) to cost P3.2 million.

“We must assess the flow of vehicles and project the volume of vehicles in the future and this will be our basis for construction traffic facilities and infrastructures (such as flyovers and overpasses),” he said. “It will be a basis to know whether a flyover would be feasible.”

He said the existing roads in the city are not with not suitable for flyover construction. “With the capacity of our roads, there is not enough space to construct flyovers,” he said. “We are not sure yet if it (a flyover) is the solution.”

In a dialogue with the local transport sector in September last year, no less than the Chief of the Baguio City Police’s Traffic Management Board, Police Superintendent Allan Logan, said that the increase of motor vehicles in the city have clogged practically all the city streets.

According to him, the number of registered motor vehicles has swelled to 38,800 compared to 36,000 some ten years ago. Of the 38,8000 carbon-emitting vehicles, 27,000 are privately-owned and the rest are public utility vehicles (6,000 of them are PUJs and 5,000 taxis).

In 2008 alone, according to De Guzman, 7,000 motor vehicles were added into the already congested streets of the city.

He said the idea was presented to the city government as early as 2006 “but there was no action”, maybe because of budgetary constraints.

About two weeks earlier, De Guzman explained to this writer that “over the past years, the impacts or urban and regional developments on the transportation system of an area and its environment have been recognized” which triggered the idea for a traffic impact assessment study in Baguio.

According to him, changes in land use, whether of type or in terms of intensity, brings about a change in the traffic to be expected from a particular section of land. This change in traffic may have unwanted effects on the surrounding traffic system as well as the neighboring areas and their occupants. Developments, such as malls, large-scale housing developments, schools and similar projects, have significant traffic generation. Increased traffic volumes on limited traffic facilities bring about deterioration in the quality of level of service.

And due to increase congestion, de Guzman added, a greater amount of wear-and-tear is experienced by vehicles, more fuel is spent and more air pollutants are emitted. “More traffic also means that more money will be needed to maintain road facilities,” he said. “Those impacts are not only operational but may extend to the environmental and economic.”

“Without addressing these traffic impacts, the economic costs associated with these impacts would be enormous,” de Guzman warned.

And to avoid such undesirable effects, and in order to plan for these effects, de Guzman said “a framework is needed to evaluate the significance of traffic-related impacts before implementation of a proposed development (such as a flyover) is allowed.”

These expected impacts strongly indicate the need to institutionalize the conduct of a traffic impact assessment or TIA on traffic-generating urban and regional development projects, he said. In recent years, de Guzman continued, more and more local government units and development proponents have realized the need for TIAs. Similar studies have been done in Davao, Cebu and Clark and just recently in Subic.

“However, for this to be successful, it is important to have a standardized TIA process for development proponents to follow,” he said. “This would likewise be complemented by standardized evaluation of TIA studies.”

“A traffic impact assessment is an important tool for evaluating possible impacts by a proposed development,” he said. “The objective of the TIA is to determine what impact the traffic of a new development will have on the existing and proposed network and what impact the existing and proposed traffic on the roadway system will have on the development.”

“Subsequently, it will provide the basis for the mitigation of adverse impacts as well as for the management of the development,” he said.*