Street life June 20, 2006

I DON’T know if you’ve noticed, but the streets of Metro Manila today are full of tricycles, motorcycles and bicycles. I used to see them only at odd hours, the bicycles and tricycles in particular venturing into the main thoroughfares to the unseeing or unmindful eyes of cops and traffic enforcers only when traffic was light. But today they’re there at all hours, not just turning nightmarish traffic during rush hour into absolute torment but threatening to cause a host of mayhem, accidental or deliberate, on the streets.

That is so particularly because the tricycles, motorcycles and bicycles no longer bother to keep to the sides of the streets. They overrun them on all sides, weaving through and dodging motor vehicles as though they were in a video game. For some reason, none of the drivers or riders appears to think he is governed by traffic rules. Who knows? Maybe there’s a perverse logic that says that if you shouldn’t be driving a tricycle or riding a bicycle on Quezon Avenue or the Edsa highway in the first place, then you are ipso facto exempted from traffic rules.

The solution to this is not to banish motorcycles, tricycles and bicycles from the face of the earth, or the streets of Metro Manila. My irritation at encountering these things in the main thoroughfares has long given way to an appreciation of the fact that gasoline today may now qualify as a prize in contests. It’s a fortune in itself. And I am not a little dismayed that the oil companies should continue to advertise their product without a thought to this. Some of the ads are plain indulgent. They offend sensibilities, if not rub salt on wound. Obviously the reason the motorcycles, tricycles and bicycles are advancing like Attila’s horde today is that gasoline prices bore a hole in the pocket. My sympathies go to bicycles in particular, which don’t use any.

The solution is to put bicycle lanes in the main streets. That’s for bicycles and motorbikes; tricycles should clearly be kept to the side streets. It’s a cause some of my friends, who believe, completely rightly, that bicycles are healthier physically and financially, have been fighting for many years. Now more than ever, they have reason to push it vigorously.

Put bicycle lanes on the main streets. Cars, buses and jeepneys found poaching on them should be stopped and their drivers given a ticket, fined, or extorted from, whichever puts a bigger chill in their hearts.
It should help to improve health, the individual’s and the nation’s. The individual stands to enjoy more exercise, or at least suffer fewer accidents, and the nation stands to conserve more fuel. Some small things have a way of producing big results.

* * *

“I think that I shall never see/ A billboard lovely as a tree/ Perhaps unless the billboards fall/ I’ll never see a tree at all.”

That’s Ogden Nash’s famous parody of Joyce Kilmer’s famous poem, and it’s hard not to be taken in by its spirit, particularly in these times. There’s a raging debate going on about billboards, with some of my friends on the side of those bitterly opposing them. My sympathies are with them.

My concern, however, is not moral. I have no beef with the sight of men and women in the throes of suggestive poses clad only in the near-pristine state God made them. Who on earth doesn’t like that -- other of course than people who believe sensuality, not to speak of sexuality, is the serpent’s invention? I wouldn’t mind falling in Hieronymus Bosch’s garden of earthly delights. My beef is people being given to feast on these sights when their eyes should be riveted only to the road.

The billboards are a road hazard. The big one in Guadalupe in particular poses the added hazard of blinding drivers with its ferocious light. Given that motorcycles and bicycles are currently swarming like locusts on the streets, well, you’d almost think the hospitals and funeral parlors were paying the perpetrators of this atrocity to improve their business.

My sympathies go as well to my friends who have been complaining about the environmental and aesthetic degradations or depredations being wrought by the billboards. I know the Edsa highway does not offer the most pleasant view in the world (I laughed my head off many years ago when the people opposing the building of the overhead Metro Rail Transit argued that it was an aesthetic outrage to Edsa), but do we really need to uglify it for no other reason than to advertise clothes, or the lack of them?

As to the environment, well, I’ll go along with Pareng Ogden. Perhaps unless the billboards fall, I’ll never see a tree at all.

* * *

I saw it in the twilight years of Ferdinand Marcos’ rule: Quezon Avenue teeming with ladies of the night at night, and indeed at one point, in the daytime. I see it again today. Past midnight, in particular, the place starts accumulating women and men in drag who vigorously hail cars the way commuters hail cabs in furious rain. It used to be that they were just content to wait for the desperate to stop by them.

Sign of the times. The last years of martial law also saw resolute efforts to hide reality with billboards, metaphorical and literal, the regime saying life had never been better. A thing even more resolutely refuted by those who braved rain, cops and shady characters, the last two often being one and the same, selling body to keep body and soul together. Roxanne sounds romantic only in song, not in real life. You can’t get a more vivid, if poignant, indicator of today’s quality of life than the sudden increase of late of the tribe of fallen Eves on the streets. Street life, street death.

Shortly after Quezon Avenue became that in the twilight years of Marcos’ rule, the sun set on Marcos’ rule. Truly, sign of the times.

http://opinion.inq7.net/inquireropinion/columns/view_article.php?article_id=5757