After seeing the failure that are the so-called “bike lanes” of Bacolod City and Negros Occ., it was a surprise to see the LGUs of the Metro Manila cities putting a little bit more effort into having their version of bike lanes actually serve their intended purpose.
The bike lanes in both areas are essentially the same. Paint is used to designate the lanes and there are no barriers or any form of physical protection for the cyclists. The only added feature for those in Metro Manila are the solar-powered cats eyes thingamajigs that make the bike lanes more visible during night time.
The big difference in enforcement. Here, nobody enforces the bike lanes so drivers regularly intrude into it and block it by parking on it all the time. Over there, someone seems to be enforcing the rules because their bike lanes are generally left open, allowing bicycles to use it as intended.
I don’t know if the heavy traffic there has made biking gain traction as an alternative mode of transportation, or if it is because of the semi-usable bike lanes, but there are noticeably more bicycles and e-scooters on Metro Manila’s roads compared to almost 3 years ago, the last time I was there.
The roads are now narrower of course, since bike lane take up half a lane, but it was nice to see people being able to take the bike and scooter option because they have been allocated a relatively safer space of their own.
It’s not ideal, as the bike lanes were not protected, and many cars still encroach on the lane or even stop or park on it, but it’s a better start than the ones we have here in our province, where bike lanes were forgotten as soon as the paint dried and bicyclists are still mostly people who do it for leisure or exercise and not yet for practical purposes.
Along with the increased bicycle usage in the big city also came e-scooters. There were much more e-scooters buzzing about its streets this time. Most used the bike lane, but when the traffic got heavy, they were all over the place. It was both nice and scary to see the technology being adopted and hopefully, rules are put in place to make their use both safe and efficient.
Our car-centric government officials who putter around in air-conditioned SUV convoys will need to update their paradigms and change their mindsets if our towns and cities are going to take part in the transportation revolution that will be needed to address the crisis currently gripping Metro Manila. This means getting bike lanes to work as designed, encouraging people to use active transportation options, establishing the rules to make transport safe and efficient, public transport decent, and reconfiguring society to make walking and biking/scootering more attractive for the majority than owning a gas guzzling and life-savings-killer dream car.
The worst thing about our bike lanes here is that they were never given much thought. The only investment our public officials made was some paint and a couple of press releases, and they already considered the job done.
Many of us think that our climate is the biggest enemy of active transportation in this country. It’s always either too hot or too wet in the Philippines. However, the increased number of bicyclists and scooters on the roads of Metro Manila after the most basic of bike lanes were created shows that the interest is there, despite the climate, pollution and congestion. That is the lesson other cities should learn as they review the state of the bike lanes they hurriedly made and quickly forgot about.
Bicycles and e-scooters take up less space than cars, consume less fossil fuels, and produce less emissions. The size of these modes of transportation also makes parking less of a problem. However, despite all the upside, most of our towns and cities do not encourage their use and this is most evident from the way our local governments treat bike lanes.
Do we really have to wait for traffic and congestion in our towns and cities to become as bad as Metro Manila levels before we start giving active transportation another chance?*
