We are suffering from the garbage crisis (trash are everywhere) and yet, we don’t seem to know how to deal with it effectively. Why not recycle it by burning the stuff to generate power? I’m not talking about the old clunky incinerators here but gasification. Britain has recently decided it’s the way to go to deal with its own garbage crisis. Says the Time Online Report:
“Gasification mixes waste with small amounts of oxygen, then heats it at a high temperature — around 1,830 degrees Fahrenheit — in an air-tight chamber. The resulting syngas — a cocktail of light gases, including methane and natural gas — is burned, boiling water into steam to run a turbine. Gasification is an established technique, already used with fossil fuels, particularly coal. Applying it to rubbish opens a new and abundant fuel source. "As a waste-disposal method, it seems to make a lot of sense," says Jonathan R. Gibbins, an energy expert at London's Imperial College.”
Why don’t we consider this type of technology here? The most environmentally conscious countries like Norway and Germany have been using this type of technology. Says the Report:
“Energos — which operates five gasification plants in Norway and one in Germany — says that on balance, the plant will shrink the island's carbon footprint. It will emit the about the same amount of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere as does decay from the landfill. "The benefit is, we're producing electricity" from a renewable source, Grimshaw says. Because those 2,000 homes won't be getting power from a fossil fuel plant, Energos estimates that will cut carbon emissions by 2,000 tons.”
Technologies like these are probably expensive. But who says that caring for the environment is cheap?
Showing posts with label urban management. Show all posts
Showing posts with label urban management. Show all posts
Monday, June 09, 2008
Thursday, June 05, 2008
Boracay, party island
Even at midnight, the green tea at Lonely Planet Cafe near the Regency Hotel in Boracay looked too green for comfort. A feet away, tourists—mostly girls from as far as Korea, China, US and Europe— in tight minimal summer clothing were grinding their hips against the frenetic urgent beat, their hands raised up high swaying like tree branches being battered by the monsoon winds. Lumen, Kathy and I were not daunted. After all, neither we were there for tea nor the humanly distraction, but a place to sit, chat, breathe fresher air, and feel the white powdery sands push up through our toes. We just had a long walk along the shorelines under the gaze of the distant stars. We needed the break to clear our senses overwhelmed by the discussions that never seem to end.
Surveying the scene, I realized how Boracay has become a place of Becoming, where souls regulated by social mores and expectations could be what they want to be. Then they return to their prim-and-proper selves once they get back into their natural abode.
“It has become a place to get laid,” says one inebriated soul whose identity I cannot recall. “It's more like a place where predators of all types converge—sexual, corporate, or commercial or the combination thereof,” says another intoxicated "social philosopher."
Harsh assessment, shall I say. Unfair.
Despite the overcrowding, there are still some nooks an crannies in the Island where one could enjoy solitude, a corner to write poems and contemplate the meaning of life and the universe. For the right price, of course.
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Congestion in MRT: the pain of "success"?
Call it the pains of “success.” Or at least, the people’s pains for MRT’s success. It seems that these days, Metro Rail Transit is always congested. If one doesn’t start riding at either end of the line (either in Baclaran in the South or North Edsa in the opposite end), one would always have to suffer being packed and squeezed like sardines inside the coaches.
It’s not for love of the trains; it’s because a commuter could save lots of time. What takes one hour or two in the bus just takes about 25 minutes in MRT.
But there’s another reason. It’s so cheap: the 25 kilometer stretch just costs P14 pesos (0.32 US cents), probably about a hundred percent cheaper than the bus. And it’s cheap because its subsidized, meaning that people who live in the rural areas are also paying the maintenance and bank amortization of an infra that is being used solely by the dwellers of Metro Manila, a case of the rural folks subsidizing the “richer” urban dwellers.
Also, part of the value added tax that each one pays to the government whenever one eats in restaurants or pays for the grocery goes to the upkeep of the MRT. Isn’t that unfair? Of course, it is! And it’s not really improving the quality of life of the urban commuters because artificial cheapness suggests that it would be congested most of the time, thus lowering each weary commuter’s “ridership quality.”
Solution? Why not charge the true cost of the facility? That way, we free the rural dwellers, especially residents of Mindanao and Visayas, the burden of paying for such a facility that they don’t use. Those who use it should be the ones to pay for it. And of course, when ticket prices are a little bit expensive, more people would think about riding the buses again thus lessening the congestion inside the trains.
Or maybe, government should think about charging variable prices: charges are higher during the peak hours and lower during the non-peak hours so that people would have the incentive to schedule their travel time accordingly.
People do respond to economic incentives.
It’s not for love of the trains; it’s because a commuter could save lots of time. What takes one hour or two in the bus just takes about 25 minutes in MRT.
But there’s another reason. It’s so cheap: the 25 kilometer stretch just costs P14 pesos (0.32 US cents), probably about a hundred percent cheaper than the bus. And it’s cheap because its subsidized, meaning that people who live in the rural areas are also paying the maintenance and bank amortization of an infra that is being used solely by the dwellers of Metro Manila, a case of the rural folks subsidizing the “richer” urban dwellers.
Also, part of the value added tax that each one pays to the government whenever one eats in restaurants or pays for the grocery goes to the upkeep of the MRT. Isn’t that unfair? Of course, it is! And it’s not really improving the quality of life of the urban commuters because artificial cheapness suggests that it would be congested most of the time, thus lowering each weary commuter’s “ridership quality.”
Solution? Why not charge the true cost of the facility? That way, we free the rural dwellers, especially residents of Mindanao and Visayas, the burden of paying for such a facility that they don’t use. Those who use it should be the ones to pay for it. And of course, when ticket prices are a little bit expensive, more people would think about riding the buses again thus lessening the congestion inside the trains.
Or maybe, government should think about charging variable prices: charges are higher during the peak hours and lower during the non-peak hours so that people would have the incentive to schedule their travel time accordingly.
People do respond to economic incentives.
Monday, August 06, 2007
On rain dance and emergency powers (or how do we address the water crisis in Metro Manila?)
Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody.—Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)
Irrigation of the land with seawater desalinated by fusion power is ancient. It’s called 'rain.' —Michael McClary, as quoted by Megan Anderson, USGS
IT’S funny that the government is thinking about having “emergency powers” to address the water-supply shortage in Metro Manila. It’s as if the government could force the rains to come by fiat or presidential signature.
Government bureaucrats could probably do the rain dance, but these actions are more likely to attract lightning than the rains that we sorely need to fall over La Mesa dam.
The fact is that the availability of water is first and foremost a question of supply: the coming of the rains, infrastructure, and the ecology that supports the entire water-generation and -distribution system. Not any amount of legislation, especially shortsighted ones, or executive fiat could change that fact.
The government, however, could manage demand through economic instruments to change people’s behavior on how they use water, thereby alleviating our water-supply concern. The structure of the country’s water-supply system lends well to the use of economic instruments, say, a variable charge.
Metro Manila’s water supply is taken largely from Angat dam, where our capacity to store water depends on the weather pattern. We usually have distinct wet and dry seasons, and we take advantage of this by storing significant volumes of water during the rainy season, especially July and August until December, to make sure we have enough to cover for the low rainfall months from March to June. We are practically saving water during the rainy days for the sunny days.
Smart move, right? Yes, but it's not as simple as that. The sad fact is that while we are trying to store water in those dams, public policy allows us to freely use water from the tap to bathe our cars, fill our swimming pools, water the lawns and flush the toilet without serious consequences on our finances.
Why? It’s because water here is so cheap; we have the cheapest rates in Asia, and that’s because the pricing of water this side of the Pacific doesn’t take into account the cost of drawing raw water coming from Umiray River, and the dams in Angat, Ipo and La Mesa.
Water charges here cover only the actual consumption, currency adjustment, environmental charge, sewerage and the value-added tax. When water is so cheap, people feel it’s so abundant that they tend to waste it. No wonder many people don’t bother to fix their faucet or mend the leaks. Nor do they bother to report the leaks to Maynilad or Manila Water when they see a pipe leaking in the streets.
But generating and bringing that water to every household in Metro Manila is not cheap. In fact, we probably have among the most expensive ways of generating, storing, processing and distributing water compared with our neighbors like Thailand, Cambodia or Vietnam. In these countries, what they do is tap directly the mighty Mekong River, process the water and distribute it to city residents.
In contrast, the Philippines has to invest in a network of dams, tributaries, reservoirs, aqueducts and treatment facilities prior to bringing them to the cities through the pipes, mostly through loans from abroad. But we still have the cheapest water compared with these countries because we don’t reflect the true cost of generating and distributing potable water. And it’s such an inequitable arrangement because Filipinos at large are paying for those loans while the major beneficiary of those investments is urban Metro Manila.
Solution? Economic instruments, say, a variable charge, that reflect two considerations: first, the cost of raw water and, second, the cycle of abundance (the rainy season) and scarcity (summer months) throughout the year.
In simpler terms, instead of charging a fixed rate per cubic meter throughout the year, the government may consider a relatively low rate during the rainy season or when the dams are full or overflowing. And as the water level in the dams goes down, the rate per cubic meter should go higher, thus reflecting the true and increasing scarcity of water supply.
This way, people would start modifying their water-use behavior as they feel the increasing scarcity. To save water and cash, they are also going to make sure their faucets don’t leak. Knowing that “unaccounted water” is going to be reflected in everybody’s water bill, they are likely to be watchful about water pilferage and leaks in their communities. Many of them might even consider investing in cisterns for storing water collected from their roofs.
The government, however, may have to calibrate water charges carefully, as extremely high rates may also drive more people into digging deep wells that could wreak havoc on groundwater sources and the environment in general. Right now, environmental scientists are blaming excessive drawdown from groundwater sources, thus causing saltwater intrusion in many parts of Metro Manila.
It is important to reflect the true cost of water, for instance, to include the generation of raw water and the development of future water sources, because of the fact that the population of Metro Manila is growing. The extra money collected could be invested in new sources, infrastructure and water-resources research to meet the growing needs of the metropolis.
This is important because at the rate the services sector is growing, it’s likely that Metro Manila will continue to attract more migrants, thus the ever-rising demand for water. If policymakers won’t be creative in their policymaking, we will just keep on suffering water crises year in and year out. (Note: I originally drafted this as editorial for BusinessMirror, Aug 7 2007)
Irrigation of the land with seawater desalinated by fusion power is ancient. It’s called 'rain.' —Michael McClary, as quoted by Megan Anderson, USGS
IT’S funny that the government is thinking about having “emergency powers” to address the water-supply shortage in Metro Manila. It’s as if the government could force the rains to come by fiat or presidential signature.
Government bureaucrats could probably do the rain dance, but these actions are more likely to attract lightning than the rains that we sorely need to fall over La Mesa dam.
The fact is that the availability of water is first and foremost a question of supply: the coming of the rains, infrastructure, and the ecology that supports the entire water-generation and -distribution system. Not any amount of legislation, especially shortsighted ones, or executive fiat could change that fact.
The government, however, could manage demand through economic instruments to change people’s behavior on how they use water, thereby alleviating our water-supply concern. The structure of the country’s water-supply system lends well to the use of economic instruments, say, a variable charge.
Metro Manila’s water supply is taken largely from Angat dam, where our capacity to store water depends on the weather pattern. We usually have distinct wet and dry seasons, and we take advantage of this by storing significant volumes of water during the rainy season, especially July and August until December, to make sure we have enough to cover for the low rainfall months from March to June. We are practically saving water during the rainy days for the sunny days.
Smart move, right? Yes, but it's not as simple as that. The sad fact is that while we are trying to store water in those dams, public policy allows us to freely use water from the tap to bathe our cars, fill our swimming pools, water the lawns and flush the toilet without serious consequences on our finances.
Why? It’s because water here is so cheap; we have the cheapest rates in Asia, and that’s because the pricing of water this side of the Pacific doesn’t take into account the cost of drawing raw water coming from Umiray River, and the dams in Angat, Ipo and La Mesa.
Water charges here cover only the actual consumption, currency adjustment, environmental charge, sewerage and the value-added tax. When water is so cheap, people feel it’s so abundant that they tend to waste it. No wonder many people don’t bother to fix their faucet or mend the leaks. Nor do they bother to report the leaks to Maynilad or Manila Water when they see a pipe leaking in the streets.
But generating and bringing that water to every household in Metro Manila is not cheap. In fact, we probably have among the most expensive ways of generating, storing, processing and distributing water compared with our neighbors like Thailand, Cambodia or Vietnam. In these countries, what they do is tap directly the mighty Mekong River, process the water and distribute it to city residents.
In contrast, the Philippines has to invest in a network of dams, tributaries, reservoirs, aqueducts and treatment facilities prior to bringing them to the cities through the pipes, mostly through loans from abroad. But we still have the cheapest water compared with these countries because we don’t reflect the true cost of generating and distributing potable water. And it’s such an inequitable arrangement because Filipinos at large are paying for those loans while the major beneficiary of those investments is urban Metro Manila.
Solution? Economic instruments, say, a variable charge, that reflect two considerations: first, the cost of raw water and, second, the cycle of abundance (the rainy season) and scarcity (summer months) throughout the year.
In simpler terms, instead of charging a fixed rate per cubic meter throughout the year, the government may consider a relatively low rate during the rainy season or when the dams are full or overflowing. And as the water level in the dams goes down, the rate per cubic meter should go higher, thus reflecting the true and increasing scarcity of water supply.
This way, people would start modifying their water-use behavior as they feel the increasing scarcity. To save water and cash, they are also going to make sure their faucets don’t leak. Knowing that “unaccounted water” is going to be reflected in everybody’s water bill, they are likely to be watchful about water pilferage and leaks in their communities. Many of them might even consider investing in cisterns for storing water collected from their roofs.
The government, however, may have to calibrate water charges carefully, as extremely high rates may also drive more people into digging deep wells that could wreak havoc on groundwater sources and the environment in general. Right now, environmental scientists are blaming excessive drawdown from groundwater sources, thus causing saltwater intrusion in many parts of Metro Manila.
It is important to reflect the true cost of water, for instance, to include the generation of raw water and the development of future water sources, because of the fact that the population of Metro Manila is growing. The extra money collected could be invested in new sources, infrastructure and water-resources research to meet the growing needs of the metropolis.
This is important because at the rate the services sector is growing, it’s likely that Metro Manila will continue to attract more migrants, thus the ever-rising demand for water. If policymakers won’t be creative in their policymaking, we will just keep on suffering water crises year in and year out. (Note: I originally drafted this as editorial for BusinessMirror, Aug 7 2007)
Thursday, August 02, 2007
Why not use economic instruments to address the water crisis?
What?! The government is thinking about "emergency powers" to address the water supply problem? Crazy! Emergency powers could never force the rains to come. But economic instruments could address the problem if only we have the guts to do so. How? I wrote something about this issue in Manila Times three years ago. Among my conclusions:
That was three years ago..."On the demand side, the government should manage demand by reflecting the cost of generating and delivering raw water in pricing for both irrigation and urban water supply. Incomes generated from this service could be used to develop additional sources of raw water.
Better still, the government should consider using “economic instruments”—for instance, variable charge—on the extraction of raw water from the dams and reservoirs to reflect the true scarcity of water. This charge should be low during the times (January, February, November and December) when the water elevation in Angat is usually high or at least above 210 meters. The charge would gradually rise as the water level declines in March, April, May, June and July, depending on the actual situation.
This way, water users—both in agriculture and in urban areas—would be pressured to conserve water in times of scarcity. This measure would require strengthening the National Water Resources Board to regulate deep wells and prevent the excessive use of water.
The water shortage calls for rigorous measures; there is no other way to do it."
Monday, July 16, 2007
Waste management: legislation without understanding
UPSET by the rising prices of commodities, a president—or so the joke goes—at one time asked his socioeconomic planning secretary to explain the problem. The socioeconomic planning secretary told the president that more people are buying these commodities, thus outstripping supply. “A classic example of the operations of the law of supply and demand, Mr. President,” he said. The president answered: “Then, I should ask Congress to repeal that law.”
The provisions of the country’s Clean Air Act and the Solid Waste Management Act on waste management somehow mirror this kind of joke foisted upon us by well-meaning individuals blinded by their lack of understanding of the dynamics of the policy issue. That explains why, as pointed out in last week’s editorial, we are experiencing a waste-management crisis, manifested in the accumulation of untreated, unprocessed biomedical, toxic and hazardous waste in the environment.
This lack of understanding clearly manifested itself early in the day with the passage of the Clean Air Act in June 1999, which banned incineration but allowed pagsisiga or the “traditional” small-scale burning of waste, including agricultural waste.
Analysts then expressed fears that the new law actually encouraged open burning of garbage, including toxic and hazardous wastes, since the vague definition provided by Section 20 of the Clean Air Act suggested that burning waste is actually fine, provided it is done in an open, decentralized, small-scale manner—an activity that could easily fit as pagsisiga for “community and neighborhood sanitation.”
Open burning or pagsisiga is actually an environmental planner’s worst-case scenario as incomplete combustion in this process implies that cancer-causing substances are generated right smack in the community.
Indeed, people started burning their garbage right in their backyards after the closure of many dumps, as local government units either failed to secure funds for conversion of these dumps into engineered landfills or failed to get the land where landfills could be constructed. Well, they did it because the Clean Air Act actually allowed them to do so.
Realizing their mistake, “environmentalists” and legislators tried to “correct” the issue by completely banning all waste combustion under the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act of 2000. They probably hoped that legislating away the burning of waste could banish the problem. The garbage crisis got worse, however, especially after the Metro Manila Development Authority failed to get adequate landfill spaces after the closure of the Payatas dump.
And while the brouhaha over the municipal solid-waste management is brewing, companies, hospitals and processing plants generating industrial waste, biomedical waste, and toxic and hazardous waste are either storing their refuse on-site for future disposal when a proper facility is available, or outsourcing their disposal to private contractors while hoping that such private firms have what it takes to handle them.
Looking at the actions of some “environmentalists” who lorded it over the crafting and passage of the solid-waste management law, one can’t help but suspect that many of them were not doing their advocacies in good faith.
Naturally, when thermal technologies are banned, the next viable option could be engineered landfills. But when LGUs tried to look for landfill spaces, many in the same network of “civil-society” groups dabbling in environmentalism also opposed landfills, citing certain environmental risks. The only correct option, they say, is “zero waste,” as if it’s actually possible to do so.
Well, “zero-waste management” is actually possible in small, isolated villages producing a few kilograms of organic waste. But it certainly wouldn’t work in megacities producing tons of municipal, industrial, and toxic and hazardous wastes. They missed this perspective because when legislators and “environmentalists” were crafting the laws, they didn’t bother to check the markets for recyclable materials.
In fact, they didn’t know at all the characteristics of Metro Manila’s waste stream. They didn’t know how much percentage is economically viable for recycling. They didn’t know who the buyers and sellers are and how much are being transacted in these recycling markets. They simply assumed that mandating recycling and reuse would automatically solve the problem like magic. Had they known these basic facts, they would have known the enormity of the problem and acted accordingly.
And the fatal flaw is the lack of understanding value and social use of land. The Philippines is a land-scarce country. Without resorting to land-saving waste-management options offered by thermal technologies and waste-to-energy plants, Philippine cities will have to gobble up huge tracts of land for landfills and dumps, thus posing strong competition for other uses like agriculture, forestry, industry and socialized housing.
This partly explains the pervasive Nimby (not in my backyard) syndrome. Certainly, it is hard to convince communities to host a landfill or a dump, knowing that such a “special land use” would destroy land values.
That is why other countries adopt an integrated waste-management program that allows for a hierarchy of options covering waste generation (minimize, reuse, recycle); storage; collection; processing, treatment and recovery; and disposal.
For instance, if thermal facilities (assuming adequate environmental standards) were available to handle what cannot be recycled (including biomedical, industrial and other toxic and hazardous waste), Metropolitan Manila can reduce the volume of waste by 90 percent.
The residual waste, or the ashes that could be made even safer to handle through vitrification, could be disposed of in monofills.
Compared to landfills that occupy hundreds of hectares, monofills need only a few hectares, thus saving a lot of land for other more socially beneficial uses. Equipped with liners and proper engineering design, environmental risks such as leaching could be eliminated. This way, the Nimby syndrome could be avoided.This is what land-scarce countries in Europe do. This flexibility of options is not currently available to us in the Philippines because our legislators chose to craft our policy with their eyes closed. If legislators won’t undo our mistakes, we are stuck with this garbage forever.
(Originally drafted as Editorial for BusinessMirror, July 17 2007).
The provisions of the country’s Clean Air Act and the Solid Waste Management Act on waste management somehow mirror this kind of joke foisted upon us by well-meaning individuals blinded by their lack of understanding of the dynamics of the policy issue. That explains why, as pointed out in last week’s editorial, we are experiencing a waste-management crisis, manifested in the accumulation of untreated, unprocessed biomedical, toxic and hazardous waste in the environment.
This lack of understanding clearly manifested itself early in the day with the passage of the Clean Air Act in June 1999, which banned incineration but allowed pagsisiga or the “traditional” small-scale burning of waste, including agricultural waste.
Analysts then expressed fears that the new law actually encouraged open burning of garbage, including toxic and hazardous wastes, since the vague definition provided by Section 20 of the Clean Air Act suggested that burning waste is actually fine, provided it is done in an open, decentralized, small-scale manner—an activity that could easily fit as pagsisiga for “community and neighborhood sanitation.”
Open burning or pagsisiga is actually an environmental planner’s worst-case scenario as incomplete combustion in this process implies that cancer-causing substances are generated right smack in the community.
Indeed, people started burning their garbage right in their backyards after the closure of many dumps, as local government units either failed to secure funds for conversion of these dumps into engineered landfills or failed to get the land where landfills could be constructed. Well, they did it because the Clean Air Act actually allowed them to do so.
Realizing their mistake, “environmentalists” and legislators tried to “correct” the issue by completely banning all waste combustion under the Ecological Solid Waste Management Act of 2000. They probably hoped that legislating away the burning of waste could banish the problem. The garbage crisis got worse, however, especially after the Metro Manila Development Authority failed to get adequate landfill spaces after the closure of the Payatas dump.
And while the brouhaha over the municipal solid-waste management is brewing, companies, hospitals and processing plants generating industrial waste, biomedical waste, and toxic and hazardous waste are either storing their refuse on-site for future disposal when a proper facility is available, or outsourcing their disposal to private contractors while hoping that such private firms have what it takes to handle them.
Looking at the actions of some “environmentalists” who lorded it over the crafting and passage of the solid-waste management law, one can’t help but suspect that many of them were not doing their advocacies in good faith.
Naturally, when thermal technologies are banned, the next viable option could be engineered landfills. But when LGUs tried to look for landfill spaces, many in the same network of “civil-society” groups dabbling in environmentalism also opposed landfills, citing certain environmental risks. The only correct option, they say, is “zero waste,” as if it’s actually possible to do so.
Well, “zero-waste management” is actually possible in small, isolated villages producing a few kilograms of organic waste. But it certainly wouldn’t work in megacities producing tons of municipal, industrial, and toxic and hazardous wastes. They missed this perspective because when legislators and “environmentalists” were crafting the laws, they didn’t bother to check the markets for recyclable materials.
In fact, they didn’t know at all the characteristics of Metro Manila’s waste stream. They didn’t know how much percentage is economically viable for recycling. They didn’t know who the buyers and sellers are and how much are being transacted in these recycling markets. They simply assumed that mandating recycling and reuse would automatically solve the problem like magic. Had they known these basic facts, they would have known the enormity of the problem and acted accordingly.
And the fatal flaw is the lack of understanding value and social use of land. The Philippines is a land-scarce country. Without resorting to land-saving waste-management options offered by thermal technologies and waste-to-energy plants, Philippine cities will have to gobble up huge tracts of land for landfills and dumps, thus posing strong competition for other uses like agriculture, forestry, industry and socialized housing.
This partly explains the pervasive Nimby (not in my backyard) syndrome. Certainly, it is hard to convince communities to host a landfill or a dump, knowing that such a “special land use” would destroy land values.
That is why other countries adopt an integrated waste-management program that allows for a hierarchy of options covering waste generation (minimize, reuse, recycle); storage; collection; processing, treatment and recovery; and disposal.
For instance, if thermal facilities (assuming adequate environmental standards) were available to handle what cannot be recycled (including biomedical, industrial and other toxic and hazardous waste), Metropolitan Manila can reduce the volume of waste by 90 percent.
The residual waste, or the ashes that could be made even safer to handle through vitrification, could be disposed of in monofills.
Compared to landfills that occupy hundreds of hectares, monofills need only a few hectares, thus saving a lot of land for other more socially beneficial uses. Equipped with liners and proper engineering design, environmental risks such as leaching could be eliminated. This way, the Nimby syndrome could be avoided.This is what land-scarce countries in Europe do. This flexibility of options is not currently available to us in the Philippines because our legislators chose to craft our policy with their eyes closed. If legislators won’t undo our mistakes, we are stuck with this garbage forever.
(Originally drafted as Editorial for BusinessMirror, July 17 2007).
Saturday, June 23, 2007
The future of Silicon Valley
Last month, I participated in the Spring 2007 Jefferson Fellowship on “innovation offshoring” sponsored by the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii, with funding from the Freeman Foundation. The Fellowship brought us to major innovation centers in Silicon Valley, China (Beijing, Shanghai) and India (Bangalore and Chennai) where we interacted with innovators, tech start-ups, venture capitalists, academics and experts on innovation offshoring. Below are some of my notes about the Silicon Valley. SAN JOSE, California—Silicon Valley, says San Jose/Silicon Valley Journal editor Norman Bell, is more of a state of mind than a piece of geography. For such an imagined technological Shangri-La, Silicon Valley continues to transform the world’s economies all the way from the United States to Ireland, Israel, India and China through an expanding tangle of collaboration, innovation and entrepreneurship. Experts believe if the rest of the developing world like the Philippines could tap into the dynamics of this collaborative network, everybody else could flourish.
Well, Silicon Valley is a tangible piece of geography—only not anyone there could agree where its boundaries lie. Tales about its origins abound. Some say the term “Silicon Valley” emerged in the early ’70s when journalists tried to describe a concentration of electronics firms in Santa Clara County that flourished after Stanford University in Palo Alto leased a huge chunk of its campus to high-tech companies after World War II. (Silicon, which is derived from silica and silicates, is extensively used in the manufacture of microchips, hence the term Silicon Valley.) Stanford then was in dire financial straits and what better way to address this problem than by setting up an industrial park?
Thus, from a rural wilderness where prunes and apricots grew (the romantics used to call it “Valley of the Heart’s Delight”), it evolved into what it is today—a kaleidoscopic region whose fortunes and boundaries changed as companies suffered booms and busts as they leap from one “the next big thing” to another: semiconductors in the ’60s to the ’70s, personal computers and work stations in the ’80s, network computing and the Internet in the ’90s, and mobile computing, biotechnology and nanotechnology in the new millennium.
“Today the tech-focused kingdom has expanded up the peninsula and over the Santa Cruz Mountains,” says Bell, who was a participant in the Spring 2007 Jefferson Fellowship on innovation offshoring sponsored by the East-West Center in Hawaii. “It spreads from downtown San Francisco, down Highway 101, past the biotech campuses of South San Francisco and the corporate campuses to the IBM software labs in south San Jose and on to the RFID [radio frequency identification] works in Morgan Hill. To the west, most agree it has spread to the coast, where the University of California Santa Cruz is making a name for itself in gaming and nanotechnology.”
Marguerite Gong Hancock, associate director of the Stanford University Project on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, estimates that Silicon Valley today covers 1,500 square miles, covering 35 cities and four counties populated by 2.4 million people, about 40 percent of whom are foreign born. It employs 1.2 million workers, about a fourth of whom are doing high-skill occupation, with productivity rate 50 percent than the national average.
And for such a small place, Hancock says the Silicon Valley accounts for 5 percent of the US gross national product and a tenth of the total number of the US patents. Then again, it is home to the current icons of American global economic power and influence—Google, Yahoo, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard, Oracle, Apple, Intel and YouTube.
“It’s a complex, dynamic region,” says Hancock, while presenting a map of the San Francisco Bay area running from San Francisco City all the way to San Jose. “It’s a proximate collection of independent cities, most of them small towns. It was unplanned, has no formal identity, no borders.”
Enduring strength
What makes Silicon Valley tick? And could it survive offshoring and outsourcing as global companies seek the cheapest locations worldwide?
These are the questions that confront Silicon Valley today but Hancock, who is currently studying innovative regions all over the world, points out that over time it has evolved “four pillars of enduring strength.” It’s a nexus of innovation and entrepreneurship; a fertile habitat for the best talents; it has supporting institutions (universities and research institutions, including Stanford and University of California); and a linkage of people, technology and capital—a network that spans across innovative cities in countries like Israel, China, Taiwan, India, Germany, Sweden, Singapore and Japan.
“People here are willing to take risks,” explains Hancock, stressing that entrepreneurs are not all afraid to fail. “When firms collapse, government doesn’t rescue them.”
Bell describes Silicon Valley as having the “frontier mentality” manifested by its “ever-changing cut-throat search for the next big thing.”
“The result is a boom-and-bust economy where serial entrepreneurs proudly list their failures and venture capitalists bet millions on companies with no customers and no revenues,” Bell writes in a paper for the Jefferson Fellowship.
The business environment is almost Darwinian: Those who have the best business ideas and models thrive because, according to Hancock, the Valley has a fertile business environment or “habitat” characterized by meritocracy, favorable government policy, open business environment, and the presence of specialized business service infrastructure that include venture capital, hotshot lawyers and accountants.
Hancock, though, admits that Silicon Valley is losing some jobs due to offshoring, as well as gains made by other centers of innovation in Israel, China, Taiwan and India.
Activities like mass manufacturing have long been gone. Back-office operations like office support, business and financial support, as well as the jobs of IT administrators, legal assistants and statistical analysts, are going to India and other offshore locations like China and the Philippines. Even jobs for entry-level computer and software engineers, quality assurance and test engineers, as well as product and process engineers, are vulnerable to offshoring.
According to economist Dieter Ernst, a senior research fellow of the East-West Center, there are fears that “innovation offshoring,” or the internationalization of product development and research toward the Asia-Pacific region, especially China and India, poses competition to Silicon Valley and other innovation centers in the United States.
Companies like Google, Yahoo, Cisco, Dell and others in the Fortune 500 are increasingly setting up R&D centers in China’s major cities like Shanghai and Beijing, while local companies like Huawei are increasing their capabilities to design and produce high-technology products, Ernst notes.
Fast changes
As early as 2003 Oracle CEO Larry Ellison already pronounced “the end of Silicon Valley as we know it.” Even further back, in 1991, the Los Angeles Times noted in an editorial that the “dreams of striking it rich are fading in Silicon Valley.”
But AnnaLee Saxenian, professor and dean of the University of California School of Information, is just amused by this kind of talk.
“In the ’80s I wrote a master’s degree thesis saying Silicon Valley is going to stop growing. I said that housing costs were too high, labor was expensive, and the roads were way too congested,” said Saxenian in a lecture to Jefferson Fellows.
She predicted that Silicon Valley was going to consolidate, that it would become like the car industry with only a few big companies surviving, and that new companies are not going to locate operations in the area. By the mid-’80s, however, the Silicon Valley’s economy was still booming, and fueled the robust growth in demand and production of personal computers. Among the leading companies at the time were Apple, Silicon Graphics and Sun Microsystems.
“I was wrong,” Saxenian concedes. “I had to revise my ideas.”
There were a couple of things she missed, she says. The first is the fact that companies in the region are part of what she considers a “regional ecosystem” built around a network of open collaboration, making firms operating in the valley more resilient and flexible. The flow of information among them is fast and smooth and this has accelerated technological change in the Valley. “They really tried to avoid hierarchy,” she notes.
This was not the case in the ’60s and ’70s. Saxenian says during those times IT companies competed based on vertical integration where they control all aspect of hardware and software production. “This kind of business organization couldn’t cope with the rapid phase of change,” she notes.
The Argonauts
The second factor she missed is the role of immigrants. Silicon Valley has a tremendous depth of talent, and about half them are foreign born, mainly Indians and Chinese. Since the ’70s and ’80s, thousands of students from developing countries, including Ireland, Israel, Taiwan, China and India, went to Stanford and other universities in California to study engineering and the sciences. Based on a 2000 survey, there are around 20,000 Indians studying in California, and another 20,000 Chinese.
Unsure of what awaits them back home, many of these students, armed with postgraduate degrees, ended up working in high-technology companies in Silicon Valley. Some of them even started setting up their own businesses in the area.
Today more than a quarter of Silicon Valley’s highly skilled workers are immigrants from several countries like China, Taiwan, India, the United Kingdom, Iran, Vietnam, the Philippines, Canada and Israel.
“By the end of the 1990s, Chinese and Indian engineers were running 29 percent of Silicon Valley’s technology businesses. By 2000, these companies collectively accounted for more than $19.5 billion in sales and 72,839 jobs. And the pace of immigrant entrepreneurship has accelerated dramatically in the past decade,” notes Saxenian.
After working a decade or more in Silicon Valley, many of these workers went back to their homeland and set up businesses, especially when the economies of their respective countries started to improve.
Saxenian admits she doesn’t have exact figures but she estimates that about 10 percent to 15 percent went home after having “marinated” in the Silicon Valley culture. Around 30 percent to 40 percent of them shuttled back and forth between Silicon Valley and their home countries, setting businesses mostly in high-technology industries, and serving as bridges to firms and innovators in both countries.
She calls them “the new Argonauts,” in reference to Greek mythology where Jason and his band sailed the high seas in search of wealth and adventure. These “Argonauts” are responsible for creating cross-Pacific collaborations that, for instance, fueled Taiwan’s rise in the 1990s as a global center of technology production.
“A similar process is now underway linking both Silicon Valley and the urban centers of Eastern China,” Saxenian said in another paper for Cornell University entitled “Brain Circulation and Capitalist Dynamics: The Silicon Valley-Shinchu-Shanghai Triangle.”
“And transnational communities have played a central role in the emergence and upgrading of software capabilities in India, Ireland and Israel.”
Tapping into this dynamic global network, she explained, could bring benefits to developing countries like the Philippines. To take advantage of the network, developing countries should invest in technical education.
Competition
The rise of innovation centers in Asia, many of which are manned by returning scientists, has been worrying some analysts, especially since this has often been associated with the loss of jobs, as well as the perceived decline in American technological superiority. According to East-West Center’s Ernst, numerous American companies are opening R&D centers all over India and China in a phenomenon called “innovation offshoring,” thus raising fears that China may eventually leap over the US in terms of technological superiority.
But Gregory Shea, president of the United States Information Technology Office representing high-technology companies in China, dismisses this view. He argues that these new R&D centers are more involved in development rather than research. Ultimately, he believes that offshoring and outsourcing will even strengthen American multinational companies.
“When you look closely at these [R&D centers], they usually involve less-than-leading-edge technology. Rather they are aimed at producing high-volume, relatively commoditized products and components for local and regional markets,” notes Shea. “These investments are critical for securing and building a strong market position in such a large and expansive market as China.”
He adds: “They are also critical to ensuring continued revenue growth for the company as a whole, which is vital to supporting high-end jobs in research, design, marketing, finance, legal and other areas of corporate administration in the headquarters [in the US] and other countries.”
Saxenian believes Silicon Valley serves as the hub of this global innovation network that reaches as far as Beijing, Shanghai, Bangalore, Ireland and Israel. “These [innovation centers] don’t compete; they complement each other,” she says.
She admits, however, that regional economies in the Asia-Pacific region will eventually develop their capabilities in innovation as they invest more in education and research, and form relevant institutions.
As such, Saxenian says Silicon Valley’s dominant role in innovation and technological change will eventually diminish. “This does not imply decline,” she quickly clarifies. “Rather it will become one of many nodes in a more open and distributed global network of differently specialized and complementary regional economies.”
Will Saxenian be proven wrong again? Only time will tell.
Well, Silicon Valley is a tangible piece of geography—only not anyone there could agree where its boundaries lie. Tales about its origins abound. Some say the term “Silicon Valley” emerged in the early ’70s when journalists tried to describe a concentration of electronics firms in Santa Clara County that flourished after Stanford University in Palo Alto leased a huge chunk of its campus to high-tech companies after World War II. (Silicon, which is derived from silica and silicates, is extensively used in the manufacture of microchips, hence the term Silicon Valley.) Stanford then was in dire financial straits and what better way to address this problem than by setting up an industrial park?
Thus, from a rural wilderness where prunes and apricots grew (the romantics used to call it “Valley of the Heart’s Delight”), it evolved into what it is today—a kaleidoscopic region whose fortunes and boundaries changed as companies suffered booms and busts as they leap from one “the next big thing” to another: semiconductors in the ’60s to the ’70s, personal computers and work stations in the ’80s, network computing and the Internet in the ’90s, and mobile computing, biotechnology and nanotechnology in the new millennium.
“Today the tech-focused kingdom has expanded up the peninsula and over the Santa Cruz Mountains,” says Bell, who was a participant in the Spring 2007 Jefferson Fellowship on innovation offshoring sponsored by the East-West Center in Hawaii. “It spreads from downtown San Francisco, down Highway 101, past the biotech campuses of South San Francisco and the corporate campuses to the IBM software labs in south San Jose and on to the RFID [radio frequency identification] works in Morgan Hill. To the west, most agree it has spread to the coast, where the University of California Santa Cruz is making a name for itself in gaming and nanotechnology.”
Marguerite Gong Hancock, associate director of the Stanford University Project on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, estimates that Silicon Valley today covers 1,500 square miles, covering 35 cities and four counties populated by 2.4 million people, about 40 percent of whom are foreign born. It employs 1.2 million workers, about a fourth of whom are doing high-skill occupation, with productivity rate 50 percent than the national average.
And for such a small place, Hancock says the Silicon Valley accounts for 5 percent of the US gross national product and a tenth of the total number of the US patents. Then again, it is home to the current icons of American global economic power and influence—Google, Yahoo, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett Packard, Oracle, Apple, Intel and YouTube.
“It’s a complex, dynamic region,” says Hancock, while presenting a map of the San Francisco Bay area running from San Francisco City all the way to San Jose. “It’s a proximate collection of independent cities, most of them small towns. It was unplanned, has no formal identity, no borders.”
Enduring strength
What makes Silicon Valley tick? And could it survive offshoring and outsourcing as global companies seek the cheapest locations worldwide?
These are the questions that confront Silicon Valley today but Hancock, who is currently studying innovative regions all over the world, points out that over time it has evolved “four pillars of enduring strength.” It’s a nexus of innovation and entrepreneurship; a fertile habitat for the best talents; it has supporting institutions (universities and research institutions, including Stanford and University of California); and a linkage of people, technology and capital—a network that spans across innovative cities in countries like Israel, China, Taiwan, India, Germany, Sweden, Singapore and Japan.
“People here are willing to take risks,” explains Hancock, stressing that entrepreneurs are not all afraid to fail. “When firms collapse, government doesn’t rescue them.”
Bell describes Silicon Valley as having the “frontier mentality” manifested by its “ever-changing cut-throat search for the next big thing.”
“The result is a boom-and-bust economy where serial entrepreneurs proudly list their failures and venture capitalists bet millions on companies with no customers and no revenues,” Bell writes in a paper for the Jefferson Fellowship.
The business environment is almost Darwinian: Those who have the best business ideas and models thrive because, according to Hancock, the Valley has a fertile business environment or “habitat” characterized by meritocracy, favorable government policy, open business environment, and the presence of specialized business service infrastructure that include venture capital, hotshot lawyers and accountants.
Hancock, though, admits that Silicon Valley is losing some jobs due to offshoring, as well as gains made by other centers of innovation in Israel, China, Taiwan and India.
Activities like mass manufacturing have long been gone. Back-office operations like office support, business and financial support, as well as the jobs of IT administrators, legal assistants and statistical analysts, are going to India and other offshore locations like China and the Philippines. Even jobs for entry-level computer and software engineers, quality assurance and test engineers, as well as product and process engineers, are vulnerable to offshoring.
According to economist Dieter Ernst, a senior research fellow of the East-West Center, there are fears that “innovation offshoring,” or the internationalization of product development and research toward the Asia-Pacific region, especially China and India, poses competition to Silicon Valley and other innovation centers in the United States.
Companies like Google, Yahoo, Cisco, Dell and others in the Fortune 500 are increasingly setting up R&D centers in China’s major cities like Shanghai and Beijing, while local companies like Huawei are increasing their capabilities to design and produce high-technology products, Ernst notes.
Fast changes
As early as 2003 Oracle CEO Larry Ellison already pronounced “the end of Silicon Valley as we know it.” Even further back, in 1991, the Los Angeles Times noted in an editorial that the “dreams of striking it rich are fading in Silicon Valley.”
But AnnaLee Saxenian, professor and dean of the University of California School of Information, is just amused by this kind of talk.
“In the ’80s I wrote a master’s degree thesis saying Silicon Valley is going to stop growing. I said that housing costs were too high, labor was expensive, and the roads were way too congested,” said Saxenian in a lecture to Jefferson Fellows.
She predicted that Silicon Valley was going to consolidate, that it would become like the car industry with only a few big companies surviving, and that new companies are not going to locate operations in the area. By the mid-’80s, however, the Silicon Valley’s economy was still booming, and fueled the robust growth in demand and production of personal computers. Among the leading companies at the time were Apple, Silicon Graphics and Sun Microsystems.
“I was wrong,” Saxenian concedes. “I had to revise my ideas.”
There were a couple of things she missed, she says. The first is the fact that companies in the region are part of what she considers a “regional ecosystem” built around a network of open collaboration, making firms operating in the valley more resilient and flexible. The flow of information among them is fast and smooth and this has accelerated technological change in the Valley. “They really tried to avoid hierarchy,” she notes.
This was not the case in the ’60s and ’70s. Saxenian says during those times IT companies competed based on vertical integration where they control all aspect of hardware and software production. “This kind of business organization couldn’t cope with the rapid phase of change,” she notes.
The Argonauts
The second factor she missed is the role of immigrants. Silicon Valley has a tremendous depth of talent, and about half them are foreign born, mainly Indians and Chinese. Since the ’70s and ’80s, thousands of students from developing countries, including Ireland, Israel, Taiwan, China and India, went to Stanford and other universities in California to study engineering and the sciences. Based on a 2000 survey, there are around 20,000 Indians studying in California, and another 20,000 Chinese.
Unsure of what awaits them back home, many of these students, armed with postgraduate degrees, ended up working in high-technology companies in Silicon Valley. Some of them even started setting up their own businesses in the area.
Today more than a quarter of Silicon Valley’s highly skilled workers are immigrants from several countries like China, Taiwan, India, the United Kingdom, Iran, Vietnam, the Philippines, Canada and Israel.
“By the end of the 1990s, Chinese and Indian engineers were running 29 percent of Silicon Valley’s technology businesses. By 2000, these companies collectively accounted for more than $19.5 billion in sales and 72,839 jobs. And the pace of immigrant entrepreneurship has accelerated dramatically in the past decade,” notes Saxenian.
After working a decade or more in Silicon Valley, many of these workers went back to their homeland and set up businesses, especially when the economies of their respective countries started to improve.
Saxenian admits she doesn’t have exact figures but she estimates that about 10 percent to 15 percent went home after having “marinated” in the Silicon Valley culture. Around 30 percent to 40 percent of them shuttled back and forth between Silicon Valley and their home countries, setting businesses mostly in high-technology industries, and serving as bridges to firms and innovators in both countries.
She calls them “the new Argonauts,” in reference to Greek mythology where Jason and his band sailed the high seas in search of wealth and adventure. These “Argonauts” are responsible for creating cross-Pacific collaborations that, for instance, fueled Taiwan’s rise in the 1990s as a global center of technology production.
“A similar process is now underway linking both Silicon Valley and the urban centers of Eastern China,” Saxenian said in another paper for Cornell University entitled “Brain Circulation and Capitalist Dynamics: The Silicon Valley-Shinchu-Shanghai Triangle.”
“And transnational communities have played a central role in the emergence and upgrading of software capabilities in India, Ireland and Israel.”
Tapping into this dynamic global network, she explained, could bring benefits to developing countries like the Philippines. To take advantage of the network, developing countries should invest in technical education.
Competition
The rise of innovation centers in Asia, many of which are manned by returning scientists, has been worrying some analysts, especially since this has often been associated with the loss of jobs, as well as the perceived decline in American technological superiority. According to East-West Center’s Ernst, numerous American companies are opening R&D centers all over India and China in a phenomenon called “innovation offshoring,” thus raising fears that China may eventually leap over the US in terms of technological superiority.
But Gregory Shea, president of the United States Information Technology Office representing high-technology companies in China, dismisses this view. He argues that these new R&D centers are more involved in development rather than research. Ultimately, he believes that offshoring and outsourcing will even strengthen American multinational companies.
“When you look closely at these [R&D centers], they usually involve less-than-leading-edge technology. Rather they are aimed at producing high-volume, relatively commoditized products and components for local and regional markets,” notes Shea. “These investments are critical for securing and building a strong market position in such a large and expansive market as China.”
He adds: “They are also critical to ensuring continued revenue growth for the company as a whole, which is vital to supporting high-end jobs in research, design, marketing, finance, legal and other areas of corporate administration in the headquarters [in the US] and other countries.”
Saxenian believes Silicon Valley serves as the hub of this global innovation network that reaches as far as Beijing, Shanghai, Bangalore, Ireland and Israel. “These [innovation centers] don’t compete; they complement each other,” she says.
She admits, however, that regional economies in the Asia-Pacific region will eventually develop their capabilities in innovation as they invest more in education and research, and form relevant institutions.
As such, Saxenian says Silicon Valley’s dominant role in innovation and technological change will eventually diminish. “This does not imply decline,” she quickly clarifies. “Rather it will become one of many nodes in a more open and distributed global network of differently specialized and complementary regional economies.”
Will Saxenian be proven wrong again? Only time will tell.
(Note: This article was published in BusinessMirror on 19 June 2007)
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Just keep on ranting, you hear?!
Hmmn, it seems like my blog do get some attention sometimes. Today, Philippine Daily Inquirer columnist Manuel Quezon cited the editorial I wrote for BusinessMirror which I archived in my blog Philippines Without Borders about to whose credit the country’s economic performance should go. I argued the government doesn’t deserve it because all along the party in power has simply been too busy putting out political fires. Neither should the Opposition denigrate the gains of the economy for they are real gains achieved by the private sector, overseas Filipino workers, and the local entrepreneur.
Quezon said:
Quezon said:
And I’d like to know what the administration and opposition have to say aboutMoral lesson? To all bloggers out there, just keep on ranting. You might yet get an ear or two and, who knows, you may even change the world for the better. Or worse.
David Llorito’s belief that the administration has been too busy playing “whack-a-mole,” that is, stamping out scandals of its own making, to really attend to what it claims it has been doing all along -- forgoing politics and focusing on the economy. As
Llorito puts it, “We could have achieved some more, probably on a par with our
fast-growing neighbors, if only the government had been really attentive to the
pulse of the economy.”
By way of proving his point, Llorito wrote that as far as the administration claim of an improved economy, “these are real gains, alright, but in truth Malacañang has little to do with it at all. A look at the national income accounts shows the country’s growth was largely driven by consumption financed by remittances, the rapid growth of cyberservices and the recovery in the export sector. The dynamics of these growth drivers have nothing to do with Palace occupants.”
Monday, February 26, 2007
Daily slaughter of the innocents
There are murderers on the loose in Metro Manila. They have killed 196 people and injured 4,339 persons in the metropolis in 2006. These numbers mean that they maim 12 persons each day and kill one every other day. No, they are not the usual gun-toting killers because their favorite weapons are their vehicles: cars, trucks, buses and jeepneys.
If we assume the same figure each year, it means that more than a thousand innocent people died and 22,000 injured in the last five years. Certainly, this is massacre using the bluntest of weapons. But the greatest tragedy of all is that the Philippine society as a whole doesn’t seem to care. Politicians, “civil-society” groups, do-gooders and the gallery of save-the-world types don’t even mention this mayhem in the streets.
The killers are vehicle drivers and their victims: the pedestrians, as reported by the “Metro Manila Accident Reporting and Analysis System” of the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA).
What this statistical report suggests is that Metro Manila, especially cities like Quezon City and Makati, has become a killer zone, a cannibal of its own children.
What’s the government doing about this now? We would like to know because we really don’t know who will be fatally hit by the bus next time. It might be the ones close to our hearts: our children crossing the streets from schools, our grandparents buying medicine, our spouse carrying food stuff from the grocery stores. It may be us.
Policymakers in this country, starting right at the Office of the President or the Department of Transportation and Communications, down to MMDA and the local government units, should really take this issue seriously. By the sheer volume of the victims, this issue should dwarf all other issues related to health and the loss to lives and limb. More so because it almost assumes the proportion of class conflict: pedestrians, the hoi polloi, versus vehicle owners.
That seems to be an oversimplification but the truth is that 70 percent of travel demand, or seven out of 10 people, move around to work, home and leisure, using public transport. That should suggest that those who are killed—those almost 196 unfortunate souls killed each day and 200 injured—mostly belong to the poorer segments of society who can’t afford the latest or even the second-hand beaten-up Toyota or Nissan.
At the root of this problem is attitudinal. Drivers and vehicle owners here simply don’t respect pedestrians. And we guess it reflects the contempt of the haves toward the have-nots in society.
Many bus or jeepney drivers are peons themselves but, because of lack of proper orientation and training on proper driving behavior, many simply carry the same negative attitude toward pedestrians. When a pedestrian raises a hand to signal an intention to cross, drivers here would simply blow their horns as they press the accelerator to bully pedestrians off the street. No wonder, accidents are common.
The immediate solution goes right smack to better traffic law enforcement. For long, traffic managers in this country have allowed rascals behind the wheels to go around violating traffic rules, especially on speed limits and traffic lights.
Of course, most of the drivers here actually don’t know traffic rules as it is common knowledge that people from the Land Transportation Office (LTO) would issue them licenses anyway —presumably for a fee. Thus, revamping LTO’s licensing system, making it transparent, is certainly one solution. If the government has the will, the government may actually outsource this function where the private sector could bid for the right to deliver this service based on certain criteria like cost-effectiveness, transparency and effectiveness.
Traffic managers and enforcers themselves, of course, are part of the problem. Just like vehicle owners and drivers who see pedestrians as lesser mortals, people who run these traffic management agencies have the same attitude toward the ordinary man on the street.
They see pedestrians as a nuisance who should get out of the way of vehicle traffic. They see them as ignorant mortals, nay cattle, to be prodded and controlled against cages and steel barriers. Thus, instead of enforcing the rules on driving behavior, government agencies like the MMDA simply penalize pedestrians even more by establishing cages and barriers that would even pin down and restrict people’s movements, thus endangering people’s lives.
Just try taking a bus at Edsa adjacent to SM in Makati City and see how the cages constructed by the MMDA under Bayani Fernando are a veritable death trap should a stampede occur. This is the only country that uses cattle cages and chicken wires to control pedestrians and traffic flow. We should be ashamed of this utterly fascistic form of urban “management.”
Somehow, this problem may reflect the greater social malaise that afflicts Philippine society. By some technical definition, more than half of the Philippine population lives in “urban areas.” But at heart, the average Filipino is still a hillbilly whose frame of mind does not transcend beyond his immediate family, network of friends and extended relatives.
Unlike countries that underwent an industrial revolution where people had to live by the rules and rigidity of a synchronized second-wave economy, the Pinoy, the rural dweller trapped in the urban jungle, has not learned to live properly in an urbanized setting. Thus he snarls when a pedestrian, a lesser mortal, gets in the way. And sometimes he hurts or kills them—“accidentally.”
Most Asian countries of course also did not experience industrial revolution to engender urbanity in their citizens. But the State came to fore to perform such function. The State, through its powers in traffic management, land-use planning and day-to-day urban management, played a crucial role, something that we sorely lack here in the Philippines.
That is why all sectors of society—especially schools, churches, businesses and civil-society groups—should help in addressing this problem. We need to bring the Filipino drivers’ attitudes and value systems into the 21st century.
We have no choice but to do it, otherwise the daily slaughter of the innocents in the streets will continue.
If we assume the same figure each year, it means that more than a thousand innocent people died and 22,000 injured in the last five years. Certainly, this is massacre using the bluntest of weapons. But the greatest tragedy of all is that the Philippine society as a whole doesn’t seem to care. Politicians, “civil-society” groups, do-gooders and the gallery of save-the-world types don’t even mention this mayhem in the streets.
The killers are vehicle drivers and their victims: the pedestrians, as reported by the “Metro Manila Accident Reporting and Analysis System” of the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA).
What this statistical report suggests is that Metro Manila, especially cities like Quezon City and Makati, has become a killer zone, a cannibal of its own children.
What’s the government doing about this now? We would like to know because we really don’t know who will be fatally hit by the bus next time. It might be the ones close to our hearts: our children crossing the streets from schools, our grandparents buying medicine, our spouse carrying food stuff from the grocery stores. It may be us.
Policymakers in this country, starting right at the Office of the President or the Department of Transportation and Communications, down to MMDA and the local government units, should really take this issue seriously. By the sheer volume of the victims, this issue should dwarf all other issues related to health and the loss to lives and limb. More so because it almost assumes the proportion of class conflict: pedestrians, the hoi polloi, versus vehicle owners.
That seems to be an oversimplification but the truth is that 70 percent of travel demand, or seven out of 10 people, move around to work, home and leisure, using public transport. That should suggest that those who are killed—those almost 196 unfortunate souls killed each day and 200 injured—mostly belong to the poorer segments of society who can’t afford the latest or even the second-hand beaten-up Toyota or Nissan.
At the root of this problem is attitudinal. Drivers and vehicle owners here simply don’t respect pedestrians. And we guess it reflects the contempt of the haves toward the have-nots in society.
Many bus or jeepney drivers are peons themselves but, because of lack of proper orientation and training on proper driving behavior, many simply carry the same negative attitude toward pedestrians. When a pedestrian raises a hand to signal an intention to cross, drivers here would simply blow their horns as they press the accelerator to bully pedestrians off the street. No wonder, accidents are common.
The immediate solution goes right smack to better traffic law enforcement. For long, traffic managers in this country have allowed rascals behind the wheels to go around violating traffic rules, especially on speed limits and traffic lights.
Of course, most of the drivers here actually don’t know traffic rules as it is common knowledge that people from the Land Transportation Office (LTO) would issue them licenses anyway —presumably for a fee. Thus, revamping LTO’s licensing system, making it transparent, is certainly one solution. If the government has the will, the government may actually outsource this function where the private sector could bid for the right to deliver this service based on certain criteria like cost-effectiveness, transparency and effectiveness.
Traffic managers and enforcers themselves, of course, are part of the problem. Just like vehicle owners and drivers who see pedestrians as lesser mortals, people who run these traffic management agencies have the same attitude toward the ordinary man on the street.
They see pedestrians as a nuisance who should get out of the way of vehicle traffic. They see them as ignorant mortals, nay cattle, to be prodded and controlled against cages and steel barriers. Thus, instead of enforcing the rules on driving behavior, government agencies like the MMDA simply penalize pedestrians even more by establishing cages and barriers that would even pin down and restrict people’s movements, thus endangering people’s lives.
Just try taking a bus at Edsa adjacent to SM in Makati City and see how the cages constructed by the MMDA under Bayani Fernando are a veritable death trap should a stampede occur. This is the only country that uses cattle cages and chicken wires to control pedestrians and traffic flow. We should be ashamed of this utterly fascistic form of urban “management.”
Somehow, this problem may reflect the greater social malaise that afflicts Philippine society. By some technical definition, more than half of the Philippine population lives in “urban areas.” But at heart, the average Filipino is still a hillbilly whose frame of mind does not transcend beyond his immediate family, network of friends and extended relatives.
Unlike countries that underwent an industrial revolution where people had to live by the rules and rigidity of a synchronized second-wave economy, the Pinoy, the rural dweller trapped in the urban jungle, has not learned to live properly in an urbanized setting. Thus he snarls when a pedestrian, a lesser mortal, gets in the way. And sometimes he hurts or kills them—“accidentally.”
Most Asian countries of course also did not experience industrial revolution to engender urbanity in their citizens. But the State came to fore to perform such function. The State, through its powers in traffic management, land-use planning and day-to-day urban management, played a crucial role, something that we sorely lack here in the Philippines.
That is why all sectors of society—especially schools, churches, businesses and civil-society groups—should help in addressing this problem. We need to bring the Filipino drivers’ attitudes and value systems into the 21st century.
We have no choice but to do it, otherwise the daily slaughter of the innocents in the streets will continue.
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