NU Paper: COOKIE MONSTER, MBAH Section 10B
What Pisses Me Off on the Road
I've been driving for more than twenty years, and I've seen the evolution of traffic in Metro Manila and its suburbs from being a mild discomfort in your trip from point A to point B back in the early 90s, to what has become a herculean struggle to keep your wits about you as endure every square kilometer of roadway in any of Manila's major streets today. I live in Cavite, spending at least three hours on the road every working day to get to and from the office. I suffer both from city as well as highway driving, and the daily routine would not be complete if road rage does not strike me at some point in the 100- or so kilometer dash from home to office and back.
In recent years, my biggest source of aggravation on the road has been the motorcycle rider. Any decent, law-abiding and even barely sane driver would not weave in and out of lanes and cut you off as if they are riding roller blades instead of a motorized vehicle. But that is what 99% of motorcycle riders do, and you try honking your horn at them, and you'd be the recipient of a deathly glare from a special breed of arrogant and stupid fool on wheels. It's a pity that the motorcycle lane has only been tried in very few major thoroughfares – with disappointing results – because I would love to have the slightest reason to force them off my lane and into the gutter. Along stretches of highways with more than one lane, I reserve the choicest blast of electronic expletive from my horn to those who clog the inner lane and thus force you to overtake from the outer lane where slow moving vehicles should be in the first place. It is truly a miracle of divine grace that I've been in only a couple of traffic altercations with these splendid soldiers of anarchy on the road.
A very close second on the list of my usual cast of adversaries on the road are tricycle drivers, again because of their intractable refusal to stay off major streets and keep to the slow lane of our roadways. A long-standing national directive issued eons ago effectively bans these three-wheeled contraptions from national highways and major roads, but nobody from the LTFRB and the LGUs have had the balls to actually enforce this rule. Whether in Commonwealth Avenue or the Aguinaldo Highway, tricycles represent a major road hazard for motorists on this side of planet.
This brings me to the third item on this list, a spot reserved for drivers who have only a dinosaur's idea of what lane discipline is all about. It is not only about staying in the proper lane if you're doing 40 kilometers per hour on a three-lane stretch of road, but also using your turn signals to change lanes and doing so in the most defensive driving mode as possible, instead of cutting other drivers off as if you're jostling for pole position in the Daytona racetrack. Worse, the Filipino driver's concept of horror vacui makes him the most dangerous – and annoying – of all motorists in the world, treating any empty space on the road, regardless if its two or more lanes across, as his rightful space in the Filipino's scheme of drivers' privileges on the road. Try getting a bird's eye view of EDSA and look at where traffic is tied up, and you'd inevitably come upon a horde of buses jamming three out of four lanes trying to pick up passengers, literally piled like pick-up sticks across the busiest of Manila's thoroughfares.
Before I go further down this list, I got to mention here the nincompoops driving without lights – any light – at night, as well as those on high beams on busy AND well-lighted streets. If I ever get to drive a tank anywhere in the country at night, I would simply force the first group off the road by running over them, and happily fire away mortar rounds at the offending lights of the other group.
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