Divide? Or Conquer?
There is always something to be said about the method of divide and conquer. 
If you want to destroy a united, then divide it into pieces and conquer each piece at a time. You know what I mean. However, if you want to solve a big problem, tackle each small problem within the big problem until you get to solve the big problem.
In a few days my country will have a new leader. In the process, he would be having other leaders to help him make either the right or wrong decisions. And there would be a lot of problems to solve. One of them is the incessant heavy and sometimes unbearable flow of traffic. It has been a position that either earns the title Tsar for a good job done or Charred for getting burned after being called a failure. Divide and conquer would be an alternative way of addressing it.
What do i care about the traffic? I don’t even have to worry about it since i live in a province where almost everything is less than an hour away. Well, just think of me as a bored stay-at-home mom who has a lot to say but no one to talk to so I’ll just blog about my thoughts.
What’s the underlying theme or thrust of the incoming administration? I would surmise that it is fighting crime. Lesser crime would mean a more stable environment to do business. So let’s divide and conquer.
What is needed?
> Routes and proper lanes for public transport
> Routes, schedules and proper lanes for delivery and products transport vehicles
> Routes and proper lanes for the private vehicles that are either going to work, school or leisurely places
> Routes and proper lanes for emergency vehicles like ambulances and fire trucks
> Routes and proper lanes for crime prevention and damage control vehicles
> Routes and proper lanes for non-fuel using vehicles like bicycles, pedicabs, and even skateboards
> Routes and proper lanes for othr vehicles i didn’t get to mention
> A budget for additional surveillance cameras with those compressed hard disks that can store months of recordings in strategic places to record traffic flow for better viewing of reality over several years
What do we have?
> A digital geographical map of the whole country’s streets, alleys, and major roads
> An estimate of the volume of vehicles that may be passing regularly in a certain location or area via the annual census results
> If the information is not available in the census results, the option to request information from vehicle companies’ on the number of vehicles sold within the past decade
> If more information is needed, the option to ask companies the number of transport vehicles used and regular routes used on a regular schedule
> Previous years’ recordings of roads that are indicative of which areas always have congested traffic
What do we do with them?
We collect all the information we need, get at least a couple of people to put together a decongestion and route plan for each type of vehicle, and then collaborate all the plans to make a whole. Easier said than done? Indeed.
Here’s an example. Go to Google maps. Enter a place where you are coming from and a destination. You shall be presented with various routes with the relevant details needed for decision making. This technology is already made available for us because people far away know we can use them to organize our countries. What we need to do is to utilize these tools in the right ways. The private sector already uses these types of navigation tools on a regular basis. Since you now have the capacity to see an aerial view of all our roads plus the position, power and resources to collaborate the data with our country’s needs, then what’s next is getting your team together.
But there’s a string attached. The people we should get to plan should be those who have no hidden agenda. By hidden agenda, I mean these.
> Are they pining for a tsar position? Because if they are then sabotage of any plans is a possibility.
> Are they easily bribed? Because if they are then they would design plans that would be beneficial only to those who can pay them at the price they want regardless of the effect on the collaborative effort.
> Are they implicitly part of a criminal group? FYI, there is a group of people who prey on private and even business vehicles parked in parking lots and make them tools for crime without the knowledge of the vehicles’ owners. They put surveillance devices on the private vehicles’ windshields, dashhoards, side mirrors, and even windows similar to those used in spy eyeglasses. They use them to monitor the activities of those people they want to commit crimes on, by regularly monitoring the routes they frequent without being seen physically doing so. Try to see if you are one of them. If you are suddenly made to stop in a place where there is a person outside the vehicle holding a piece of paper or a cellphone with a message facing your windshield or one of your windows, then your vehicle may have been compromised.
What’s next?
Encourage the planners to create plans that would use side roads for alternate routes for those going to school and work. Make sure all these routes are well disseminated to schools and offices. This would not be expensive if you could get the planners to create an illustration of these routes and make them available on various websites for easier dissemination and reference. If it is possible, have several private vehicles try the routes on rush hours to see the actual time it takes to course through it. Then it would be easier to present the route to the public with actual information of ETA estimates. Then have someone listen to the feedback of the public on the effectivity of the routes via polls or SMS for further improvements.
Encourage the planners to ask companies and small businesses to present their preferred schedules and routes for their transport vehicles. That way you would be able to find out what they consider as cost effective routes for them and lessen conflict with the business sector. Then use the information to either allow them to pass through their preferred routes or plan for other routes that could be presented to the business sector. But you have to disseminate it to the business sector separately from the public sector to find out what they think about them firsthand. Their vehicles may be lesser than the private sector but they are usually longer. Which means one long truck may be equivalent to the space consumed by four to five cars.
Have the planners prepare a route for all types of emergency, crime prevention, and damage control vehicles. These routes should be disseminated to all drivers and offices of these vehicles. These routes should also be made available to the public should they be in need of routes in emergency situations. Then there would be no excuse for these vehicles not to get to hospitals, fires, crime ridden places at the fastest times. Not to mention it would also lessen the irritation of the public with the reality that some emergency vehicles are actually used as shuttle services under the guise of emergencies with sirens ringing.
Planning takes a lot of time and implementation is even more frustrating. It is very important for the public to cooperate of course. And yet, the public has to be informed so they would find it easier to cooperate if they find that the plans laid are beneficial to them. But when done right and with a firm hand, these are the possible results:
> Have our traffic flow be either a good business indicator or not
> Develop a regular traffic statistical information webpage that would help other public services
offices in their planning and decision making
> Allow our various public service offices to use these information to see which places needs more roads, how much budget is needed for these roads, develop plans for putting up these additional roads, overpasses, freeways, bridges, pedestrian walkways, non-fuel using vehicle side roads and other such structures that would make our country more attractive to investors and make criminals easier to catch and crimes prevented. Because honestly, widening roads and eating private lands by doing so is overrated and I think would not be doing much good in the long run.
Last but not the least, plan and implement not only for the country’s capital city. Do the same thing for the provinces. That way, we could also pave the way for our provinces to become new and alternative places to put up and do business in the near future.
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