Rebuild the old ranklin Bridge

  By Gerry Garcia

We’re coming up with additional comments to what we said in our last week’s column pertaining to an impending traffic stall in the vast CSI shopping area in Lucao after construction of the new Dawel-Pantal diversion road shall have been concluded.

Traffic pouring out of the De Venecia diversion road exit is bound to merge with that of the then just completed Dawel-Pantal road. And the expected result: a formidable gridlock. An unfortunate consequence of lack of coordination between two construction firms. One is led by Fidel Ginez and the other by our luckless former Mayor Benjie Lim.

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But there could be a way out, especially for car-riding commuters using the Dawel-Pantal road who do not relish being enmeshed in the gridlock, if efforts are made by the city administration today to continue with a project that had been started and suddenly dropped during the administration of the late Mayor “Opring” Manaois—rebuilding the old Franklin Bridge over the Calmay River. There remains only a short stretch of the unfinished bridge.

The Calmay Bridge, washed away by the devastating 1935 flood, used to be the only bridge linking Poblacion Dagupan to its neighboring towns of Binmaley and Lingayen through the only road available. The Perez Boulevard extending to the new Tapuac highway was then non-existent as Dagupan was still a growing rural community.

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A new Franklin Bridge, expected to very possibly open Calmay and neighboring barangays for development, will also re-open a long neglected short-cut route to Binmaley which is, by the way, now a growing commercial town and vehicular traffic is building up.

The short-cut route, on reaching Binmaley, cuts to through the highway leading to the town proper and merges with the town’s new diversion road to Barangay Talaba and adjacent other barangays. This diversion road winds its way further past Lingayen barangays to end up at the highway leading to Bugallon town.

So we would have a new diversion road starting from the new Franklin Bridge in Calmay, Dagupan, extending all the way through new diversion routes around traffic-bound Binmaley and Lingayen.

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Another New Year is just around the corner and most local optimists can’t help exulting over what seems to them the beginning of the end of the Erap era, especially when PGMA just granted the convicted ex-President ad instant noodle of absolute pardon. To most local skeptics, however, the impression is that PGMA, through her    magnanimous grant of instant pardon, is taking in more than she can chew.

True enough, ex-Pres. Erap, over the super OA within of outside of his original kingdom, was  profuse in his expression of gratitude to his “fake” President and vowed to no longer run for any public office, much less the presidency. From now on, he further said, he would devote his remaining years (he’s now 70) to caring for his dying octogenarian mother, his family and friends, but most especially to help the administration’s Gloria’s flight against poverty. This last part seems, to most Erap advocates, to be nothing more than an election campaign derring do meant to boost the presidential bid of either Joseph of Jinggoy in 2010. A far cry from the ever growing hope of most Pangasinenses who are intent on focusing their election choice on the candidate most likely to help put an end the festering corruption in the government — Sen. Ping Lacson whose objection to the traditional pork barrel in Congress  has  always been so conscientious that he has always kept his hands off the tempting gold mine since the time he first became a member of the Congress.

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