Why do I opposed this? For every road-widening the government does, then the narrower the space becomes for pedestrian sidewalks and trees to be standing up. The streets become simply pro-vehicles, and no longer pro-people and pro-trees which means hotter days of walking through them. Actually you will see traces of how wide the pedestrian sidewalks used to be and which have now been taken over by roads.
What is the purpose of road-widening except to allow more vehicles to wheel in and out of the streets? That would mean also more and more people being conveyed from one point to the other.
Is this not a rather narrow view of development? That in order to solve traffic, you widen the roads so more vehicles can have access (daw). Absurd is it not? More vehicles means more traffic, not less at all.
Why do floods occur? There is already inept waste management. Too much garbage is being off loaded from MMla which the trucks could no longer finish in a day. Zero-waste management is a total failure in MMla. And many are uneducated about not throwing plastics, styrofoam and other non-biodegradable objects but wrapping them up and throwing them properly in the waste cans.
Then every five o-clock in the afternoon, have you seen air-conditioned buses being packed to the brim? Oxygen is such an expensive commodity around here already.
The number one project of the government should be to look for spaces outside of MetroManila where schools and businesses can be located instead of lumping them altogether here. The best idea is to create, as one activist said, satellite cities outside of MMla, so that people would not have to commute to Manila to work, or even to experience recreation in the cool malls.
I hope that when the MMla cities' officials think of road-widening, they could also view how much resources will be needed to support the people -- water, shelter, etc. Moving people requires making them breathe normally in the spaces where they are located, and not packing them up like sardines in one lot.
Maybe to drive home our point, all media especially TV, since it is a very visual medium and our government functionaries seem to be missing a lot on graphics, could carry a segment on how overcrowded MMla already is.
To have decent spaces for living is to breathe well and to live well.
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