Traffic problems still unresolved

By Gerry Garcia

COMMITTEE executives tasked with recovering sidewalks for pedestrian use, especially in the city’s major streets, should focus attention on places where more people tend to flock in sheer number owing to the presence in the area of establishments or institutions catering to their various needs, like hospitals, schools, etc.

Nable Street, for instance, starting from the foot of the Quintos Bridge leading to the Pangasinan Medical Center and UPang, is always brisk with people going to the hospital and the university, most of whom are car-riding visitors from outside the city faced with a common problem: finding a place to park the car.

In that short street of Nable leading to both institutions the needed parking space is often usurped by sidewalk eateries which often do their cooking on the street shoulder… and serving their customers also in the same spot.

Available parking space offered by Victoria Hotel in the same vicinity is unfortunately not often available… despite the parking fee.

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Ridding sidewalks and street shoulders in the city of obstructions, like those mentioned would amount to nothing more than restoring the right of use to people deserving them: the pedestrians and the motorists in need of parking space.

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In some open highways in the province, traditional obstructions to traffic still remained unresolved. Like palay or rice grains laid out on half of the road for drying by farmers bent on converting the highway into a multi-purpose project. You’ll see evidence of this along the highways between Manat (Binmaley) and San Carlos City and between Alcala and Bayambang.

Cause for the motorists’ added worry is the nail-spiked board neatly placed by the farmer to protect his grains from being run over by infuriated motorists.

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There’s unprecedented rise too, in the number of motorbikes plying the highways in the province. In Metro Manila cellphone snatchers and shoulder-bag grabbers victimizing mostly women are often reportedly using motorbikes for instant get-away after the heist. It’s also the choice of hired killers and assassins. That these same things are happening in Pangasinan is becoming more a fact than a myth.

(For past columns, click http://sundaypunch.prepys.com/archives/category/opinion/here-and-there/)

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