Here and There
Decongesting Dagupan
By Gerry Garcia
SHOPPING in this city’s business center, especially for car-riding commuters from outside Dagupan, has become a chore next to the impossible of being achieved.
Why?
First of all, because our streets in the downtown area narrow and filled to the brim with passenger jeepneys and buses momentarily stalled to hail passengers wanting to go home. Private motorists, as a result, continue to scour the entire length of the crowded street for a space to park their cars thereby further abetting traffic snarls.
Finding no space, the frustrated motorists either leave or . . . risk having their cars towed away for wrong parking. And the cost of recovering the car is quite forbidding: P1,000 only.
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The car-parking problem in downtown Dagupan, especially for motorists wanting to do business at city hall, is not getting any better because city hall itself sits practically in the middle of the business center. Cars around city hall are packed like sardines because the city hall area itself is like the can in which the sardines are packed —narrow and limited.
Compounding the traffic confusion starting at city hall is the “university belt” which includes in its equally limited territory two full-grown universities, University of Luzon and Lyceum-Northwestern University, another private school, Edna’s School and the Dagupan City National High School, St. John’s College and the West Central School.
All these establishments on the west-side of city hall and the commercial center on the east-side are like giant frames flanking Dagupan’s little city hall and making it look like a helpless little boy lost.
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The relatively new Urdaneta City, fast catching up with our 57 year-old Dagupan City, has liberated its government center from the city’s booming business center and established it a distance away along MacArthur Highway leading to Baguio City.
Here in Dagupan, our city development experts are missing a golden opportunity to relocate city hall in the city’s largest and most promising barangay– Bonuan, a coastal community directly facing the historic Lingayen Gulf; blessed with three gas-filling stations and is the residential place of the country’s longest term-serving Speaker of the House of Representatives– Speaker Joe de Venecia, Jr.
Barangay Bonuan is also home to one of the country’s national parks – the Tondaligan.
Nearby is a long standing but neglected park the MacArthur Park where stands a monument of the pipe-bearing general towering over part of the vast Lingayen coastal beach.
(For past columns, click http://sundaypunch.prepys.com/archives/category/opinion/here-and-there/)
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