traffic jams and traffic signs

I give up. Filipinos are either color blind or apathetic. Or both. No maybe it is not just us, since the general expatriate community including those with those spiffy blue plates do it all the time. If you still need to ask what I am talking about, it is either you are not in the country or you have police escorts when you go out of the house.

Red means stop. Green means go. Pedestrians cross on either the overpass or the underpass. Pretty simple right? OH HELL NO! In the typical Filipino attitude of "I can get away with it if you aren't looking and I know people" , no one bothers anymore. Lemme give you an example:

It is a weekday afternoon. Everyone has been through the daily grind and each person believes he/she deserves to get home first, at the expense of everyone else. So if the person has a car, he drives it right in to the queue, never mind if the traffic lights are about to go red. Never mind if your car dangling on the middle of the intersection will be blocking the lane that just went green. Ok, so the guy on the other lane, feeling just as self righteous as the guy blocking the intersection, maneuvers deftly into the fray and gets jammed himself, what with all the pedestrians suddenly swarming like bees. Pedestrains who do not have an ounce of self preservation instinct in their overriding obsession to get home (they had a tough day after all and deserve to get home first). So with the opposite ends of the intersection populated by nimrod jeepney and bus drivers who think that the best place to let their passengers off would be the middle lane, the jam moves trickle by arduous trickle, made all the more agonizing by each person's blinding selfishness to meet their end. End of story? The 20 minute trip becomes 3 hours. Go figure.

Oh don't even get me started on what happens when it rains, and why all the streets get flooded when three dogs decide to piss together, why those squatters think it is the government's job to give them homes when all the rest of us need to break our backs to buy them.

from the memoirs 10/16/05