Why is every traffic “solution” proposed by our authorities always “Bawal”?

That’s not management. That’s avoidance.

People need to move. That will never change, nor can it be completely stopped by government. Article III, Section 6 of our Constitution protects the right to travel, and can only be restricted for national security, public safety, or public health, and even those restrictions must be reasonable and provided by law, not just convenient administrative whims.

The job we road users and taxpayers gave you is simple: build systems that let us move as efficiently as possible—not to just keep inventing new things to ban. Anyone can ban things. That’s easy. But if banning actually solved problems, we could eliminate traffic tomorrow by banning all vehicles. Looks great in a report, sure, but in reality, it would work about as well as banning hunger.

Yet every time the public screams, our traffic czars reach for the same lazy playbook: another coding scheme, close more U-turn slots, kill left turns, ban trucks during the day, ban provincial buses, ban gasoline and diesel private cars on certain days—anything except those pesky e-bikes and trikes of course (because, alam mo na, election votes don’t grow on trees).

I can get the logic of truck-ban hours… in theory. Delivery companies can shift to night schedules. It’s a sacrifice, sure, but it’s the same idea as staggered work hours or WFH in other sectors. Spread the load. Flatten the curve. The problem? In practice, half the trucks eventually get “exemptions”, so the ban potentially becomes another kotong vending machine instead of real policy.

And closing U-turn slots? Please. Take the Kamuning–EDSA U-turn that was sealed a few years ago: southbound travel time jumped from 10–15 minutes to 30–45 minutes on a normal day, because everyone now has to go all the way to Cubao or Quezon Ave just to reverse direction. You didn’t remove the need to U-turn—you just pushed the queue 5–8 km down the road. More fuel burned, more hours wasted, more vehicle-kilometers choking the network. Congrats, you solved one bottleneck by creating three new ones.

They’ll defend their programs to the end of EDSA, waving their PowerPoint slides about “improved flow at the closure point.” Sure, locally it looks better, but system-wide it’s a disaster because the underlying demand never disappeared. Those cars are still on the road at the same hour trying to reach the same destinations.

Real solutions require addressing that and actually reducing the number of vehicles on the road. Like a mass transit system that people trust (the MRT-3 rehab in 2019 proved it’s possible when ridership hit 500k/day for a while, until maintenance was neglected again) 

They can also introduce genuine ride-sharing and carpool incentives, not harassing them or banning them the moment they get popular like LTFRB did with UBER and the Wunder carpool app in 2017. 

Create walkable neighborhoods and permanent work-from-home policies for jobs that allow it. 

And of course the final boss no one wants to fight: genuine decentralization—create jobs and economic opportunity outside Metro Manila so not everyone has to cram into this city every morning.

But those things are hard. And that’s exactly why our roads stay hell—because the people in charge would rather ban movement than actually manage it.