“Many of the tricycle drivers carelessly drive against the traffic with impunity, endangering other motorists”
One of the chores I have to do every December is to go to the Ninoy Aquino International Airport to pick up family members coming home for the Holidays just like many Filipino families.
As everyone knows, meeting someone at the NAIA is always a struggle.
This is because NAIA is at its busiest this time of year with a lot of shenanigans happening.
Except, however, for one airport employee caught escorting suspected human trafficking victims, this year can, therefore, be considered uneventful compared to previous years.
The traffic going in and out of the airport complex. however, has gotten a lot worse.
Many of the tricycle drivers carelessly drive against the traffic with impunity, endangering other motorists.
The depressing sight of those shirtless men in shorts and thongs drinking or just loitering around with the piles of uncollected garbage along the streets going to the terminal buildings unfortunately have not disappeared.
Yet, this is the first sight that foreign tourists will see when they get out of the terminal buildings.
This perhaps explains why, compared to our neighbors, the number of foreign visitors coming here is so small.
As I have written in the past, we are the only country that I know that has never taken any concrete steps to improve the area going in and out of our airports.
Even in the much poorer countries in Africa, they at least try to make an effort to improve and beautify their airport surroundings because even they realize that first impressions are important when visiting a country.
Tramo, for instance, has been like the way it is ever since I can remember.
And the squatter colonies along the roads going to terminals one, two and three have gotten worst instead of have improved.
Now, we read in the papers that the DOTr is in a hurry to sign the privatization proposals of several conglomerates that submitted their joint bids of about P170b to rehabilitate and modernize the NAIA.
Some are criticizing the haste of this move but I would grant that the DOTr simply wants to fast track the rehabilitation which has been delayed for many years.
But it would help if the DOTr make public the whole scope of the work to be done.
From my experience of working in the DOTr, my initial impression of the money allotted for the project is too small if what the government wants is to provide a state of the art facility that we can all be proud of.
We would expect that part of the scope of work to be done is clearing of the squatter colonies along Tramo road and the roads leading to the three terminal buildings, terminal, burying all the spaghetti electric wirings to remove all those unsightly huge electrical columns that dot the roads together with the landscaping of the roads going to the airport terminal buildings.
Lowering the density of population in the area is also a must.
All these will require an outlay much bigger than the P170b being mentioned in the media.
I suspect that what will happen instead would be to focus on the rehabilitation of the three terminal buildings together with the parking areas.
The empty lands like the former Nayong Filipino will be developed into a commercial area which will attract additional traffic.
It is also doubtful whether the size of the squatter colonies along Tramo and the streets going to the three terminals will be significantly reduced.
This is because the squatter colonies affect the ambiance of airport operations in a big way which constitute a huge part of the problem of NAIA.
It is, therefore, essential that the DOTr and the winning proponents address the problem of the squatter colonies to maximize the benefits of the airport rehabilitation.
After all, what travelers would like to see and experience after rehabilitation is to be able to travel seamlessly to the “new” NAIA comfortably without any hustles just like the airports of our neighbors such as Singapore.
I hope, however, that I am all wrong on this and that DOTr has everything all covered.