Of red tape and red lights

Watch the traffic build up on Diversion Road on a Friday afternoon. Every time a new glass-and-steel commercial box opens, the chokehold tightens. For years, we’ve played a losing game in Iloilo City: developers privatize their profits, but enthusiastically socialize their traffic footprint.

This is the lifecycle of a new commercial strip: They build it; cars flood the avenue; traffic grinds to a halt.

Then, the city government has to step in, spending, say, PHP 5,000,000 of our tax money on new synchronized traffic lights, deploying a dozen auxiliaries, and tearing up sidewalks just to carve out loading bays.

Councilor Sedfrey Cabaluna wants to stop the bleeding. His proposed ordinance at the Sangguniang Panlungsod finally demands a real Traffic Impact Assessment (TIA) before a locational clearance – and subsequently, a building permit – is issued. Right now, TIAs are basically just dropped off at a desk as a mere notice. No one actually requires them to mitigate anything.

The new rule forces the people pouring the concrete to internalize the cost of their own congestion.

Cue the inevitable pushback. We’ll hear the usual suspects complain that this is “anti-business red tape.” That it slows down Iloilo’s economic miracle and scares away investors.

Let them complain. The real threat to our boom isn’t a delayed permit; it’s road gridlock. A city choking on its own exhaust stops attracting talent and capital. Enduring a bit of bureaucratic friction upfront is the only way to save the daily commute and preserve Iloilo’s famous liveability as it scales. Proactive regulation is not anti-business – it is long-term survival.

But Cabaluna’s measure is not bulletproof as it deliberately exempts “small or medium-sized” developments such as minor renovations and boarding houses.

Anyone who actually drives here knows that urban congestion often suffers a death by a thousand cuts. A densely packed block of unregulated boarding houses in La Paz, or a sudden cluster of strip malls in Jaro, can create a worse choke point than a single, well-planned mega-development on a main artery.

By giving small builds a free pass, the ordinance highlights a massive blind spot and ignores the hyper-local micro-congestion slowly strangling our barangays.

And then there is the enforcement reality.

Passing a law is easy, but enforcing it takes teeth. Requiring a TIA is useless if the city government just rubber-stamps it to keep well-connected builders happy.

Do we even have the technical capacity at City Hall to scrutinize these highly complex engineering studies? Do we have the political will to look a major developer in the eye and reject a flawed assessment? If a TIA is just another piece of paper to be filed away in a dusty cabinet, this ordinance is a paper tiger.

We need to demand transparency. We need to know who is reading these reports, and how they track the promised mitigation measures once the ribbon is cut.

A bound traffic study does not move cars. People with the guts to say “no” to bad building plans do.