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opinionAlso in this section:
Leis, Watch out! Posada Carriles is loose! Silié, Rio Group and European Union support Haiti Pilgrim, Biofuels a step forward Jackson, A flawed plan to deal with Panama City congestion Sirias, Inside the mind of a tormented writer
A flawed plan to reduce Panama City congestion by Eric Jackson The Torrijos administration, which was elected to office in a campaign that centered around a meaningless slogan --- sí se puede, or "yes you can" (do what?) --- has since shown itself far more adept at tossing out buzzwords than at giving them any sort of relevant content. "Zero corruption?" Yeah, with his uncle getting public beach front land at Punta Chame for a fraction of a cent per square meter and his cousin getting part of a national park at a similar price, and Minister of Government and Justice Olga Gólcher also getting beach front land near his uncle at maybe two percent of market value, we now know what that meant. "Transparency?" After last year's disgraceful information control games with respect to the canal expansion referendum, we know some of what that's about too. But that's minor compared to the poison medicine scandal. People died because the Torrijos administration concealed the fact that people were getting sick and dying in large numbers, under mysterious circumstances. Doctors and other public health care workers reported this to their institutional superiors weeks before the government admitted it, and in the meantime more people kept taking that poisonous cough syrup. The relevant questions now are what Torrijos knew about this and when he knew it and I can't help but suspect that one reason why Health Minister Alleyne and Seguro Social director Luciani haven't been given their well deserved walking papers is that this might prompt them to say things about that taboo subject. And now we have some more buzz words, "Trasmilenio" and "Cinta Costera," chanted as a mantra about the metro area's traffic congestion. The former may or may not have something to it, but the latter patently does not. Let me explain. The "Trasmilenio" idea apparently came to Panama by way of Bogota, which in turn got its idea from Curitiba, a city of about a million and a half in southern Brazil. There, large buses designed with multiple doors that open level to a platform, to which people gain access by paying the fare in advance, run in special lanes to which other kinds of traffic are excluded. They only stop at designated platforms. They carry more people than ordinary buses and are faster than driving in either a bus or a car down a city's main arteries. The system, also known as "Bus Rapid Transit" or BRT, works well in Curitiba and has been copied to various extents in other places. Does it work as well as light rail, monorail or subway systems? Well, it tends to be a lot cheaper than the latter and has its pros and cons with respect to the former --- when it is carried out efficiently, honestly and with some loyalty to the basic concept. But a lot of places that say they have BRT systems have only implemented certain superficial aspects of it and have met with only superficial success. Like Martín Torrijos has done with respect to "transparency" and "zero corruption," they have adopted the buzz word but thrown away the meaning. Now I liked the general concept of Mireya's light rail proposal, but I also saw that, first, she wouldn't have the money to implement it during the term of her kleptocratic regime, and second, that because of undue pressures from special interests like the taxi syndicates it was a badly drawn plan. Any worthy light rail system in our metro area should have stops at both the Tocumen and Albrook airports and the National Bus Teminal, and Mireya's plan carefully omitted these. The Trasmilenio appears to share these same shortcomings with Mireya's plan. It would not give us a well integrated urban transit system. The public discussion of the Trasmilenio project has centered on the "articulated" nature of the buses, which is a non-essential element and most likely means that the contract has the "name and surname" of a particular manufacturer. Is it the one who provided Bogota's system? There have been complaints that those vehicles aren't very durable. I can see all sorts of crummy "compromises" that would just mean that the switch from the diablos rojos to the Trasmilenio is a transfer of urban mass transit from small to big business. Allowing other vehicles to in any way get into the special bus lanes, for example, would quickly negate the speed advantage essentially to to the proposal's success. In some places imitations of the Curitiba system have relied on buses with just one door, which are slower to enter and exit from the platforms. And so on. What's the bottom line about the Trasmilenio? As a technical matter there are some good things to be said about that possibility, but I don't trust Torrijos to do it right. I have confidence in neither his abilities nor his intentions, nor in the Aggie frat boy clique that surrounds him. He's earned my mistrust with all of his previous deceptive buzz words. So, what about the Cinta Costera? Won't that ease the gridlock on Avenida Balboa? It has long been demonstrated that building new roads doesn't relieve urban traffic congestion. The new roads invevitably just attract more cars. This was old news back in the 70s, when I was learning urban policy both in school and on the job. Designing cities for cars and not people is not only a well proven mistake from the urban congestion point of view, it's a ruinously expensive national energy policy. I suppose that a government of, by and for people for whom Disney World is Mecca might fail to notice that the 50s and 60s model of US urban development was mistaken, but it really isn't any big secret. It's today's conventional wisdom in American academia, after all. Now they do have some downright dumb people in the Torrijos entourage, and it's amazing how uncultured our ruling political elites tend to be. Still, the PRD has enough smart and well educated people in it to as an institution know the score about this issue. This is not an error based upon stupidity or ignorance. The Cinta Costera is just a plan to create more landfill for developers that's being sold as something else. It's a palpable fraud insofar as it's promoted by the Torrijos administration as a solution to Panama City's traffic problems. Because the Cinta Costera flies in the face of so much that has been learned for so many years in so many places, the Torrijos administration's advocacy of it makes me less willing to believe anything it says about the other part of its anti-congestion plan, the Trasmilenio. After so much deceit this president and the men and women around him just don't deserve the benefit of the doubt anymore.
Also in this section:
Leis, Watch out! Posada Carriles is loose! Silié, Rio Group and European Union support Haiti Pilgrim, Biofuels a step forward Jackson, A flawed plan to deal with Panama City congestion Sirias, Inside the mind of a tormented writer Unclassified Ads | Calendar | Outdoors | Dining | Science | Sports | Español | Front Page Archives | Wappin' Radio Show | Just Music
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