Пешеходы в Маниле стали «планктоном» в пищевой цепи дорог из-за отсутствия защиты

MY other job at The Manila Times is Science and Technology editor. Because of this, I have encountered plankton more often than I ever expected to in journalism, usually while editing or writing stories about marine ecosystems, climate change, fisheries, and ocean health. Somewhere along the way, probably while sitting in a bus stuck in traffic and watching pedestrians weave through cars, motorcycles, jeepneys, and buses, something occurred to me. Philippine roads have their own food chain, and pedestrians are plankton. It sounds ridiculous until you think about it. Plankton live at the bottom of the marine food chain, largely at the mercy of currents and surrounded by creatures much bigger than themselves. If you are plankton, almost everything around you has the advantage. Now stand at the intersection of, say, Taft and Buendia, anywhere along D. Macapagal Ave., by any of EDSA’s Metro Rail Transit stations, or at my favorite drop-off point in Dela Rosa, Makati, and observe. A pedestrian has buses and trucks weighing several tons bearing down on him or her, SUVs and cars squeezing through whatever space is available, motorcycles appearing from places where you did not know a vehicle could fit, and bicycles trying to survive the same mess. Everybody is faster, and almost everybody has some form of protection around them. We motorists, of course, complain about pedestrians. I do. They cross wherever they want, sometimes meters away from a pedestrian lane. They walk on the road, emerge between parked vehicles and stroll across four lanes as though they were crossing their living room. There are moments behind the wheel when you genuinely wonder whether self-preservation has become optional. But after the horn has been sounded and the blood pressure has returned to normal, there is another question worth asking: Why are so many people walking on the road in the first place? Try walking along one of the roads you normally drive, and the answer becomes obvious. The sidewalk starts properly enough, then gets narrower. A utility pole appears in the middle. Farther along are parked motorcycles, merchandise, and construction materials, and then, without warning, the sidewalk disappears. If you are lucky, another one begins farther down. If not, congratulations, you are now walking with traffic. Naturally, we motorists get annoyed because pedestrians are on “our road.” Maybe that is where the problem begins. We don’t have a movable land title to the piece of asphalt we occupy at that particular moment. If drivers call riders “kamote” and riders call cyclists “surot,” what are pedestrians? Kuto? Well, maybe plankton is more elegant. Somehow, we have come to regard roads as places for motor vehicles and pedestrians as people who occasionally intrude upon them. We build roads wider so vehicles can move faster, then paint a pedestrian crossing across four or six lanes and expect a few white stripes to sort out the difference between a human being and two tons of metal traveling at 60 kph. Then there is the footbridge, that peculiar piece of infrastructure where we solve the problem of people crossing a road by making people climb over it. For someone young and fit, fine. But imagine being 70, carrying groceries, walking with a toddler, having a bad knee, or facing several flights of stairs with a disability. We make pedestrians do all the hard work and heavy lifting so that cars underneath do not have to stop, then complain about discipline when people cross at street level. Discipline does matter. Pedestrians do stupid things. So do motorcycle riders, cyclists, drivers and, on occasion, motoring columnists. Anyone who spends enough time on our roads eventually does something he or she probably should not have done. The difference is what happens when we get it wrong. Behind the wheel, I have seat belts, airbags, anti-lock brakes, electronic stability control, crumple zones, and a steel structure designed by engineers to keep me alive. Modern cars can warn me about vehicles in my blind spot, brake when I fail to notice an obstacle, and tell me when I drift out of my lane. Motorcyclists have helmets (teacher-motorcyclists may sometimes not). Big bikers don protective suits. But pedestrians? A pedestrian has slippers. And that, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, is the road food chain in one image. Truck, bus, SUV, car, motorcycle, bicycle, pedestrian. The farther down you go, the less metal there is between flesh and physics. Yet, our road safety conversations often begin with the behavior of the weakest person in that chain. Why didn’t he use the crossing? Why was he walking on the road? Why didn’t he use the footbridge? Why didn’t he look? Fair questions, but we should also ask why the crossing was so far away, why the sidewalk ended, and why vehicles were moving that quickly through an area full of people. Why do we require the person with the least protection to make every correct decision while everyone around him operates machinery capable of killing him? The driver cursing the pedestrian becomes one the moment he or she parks. There isn’t really a separate species called “pedestrian.” It is simply what all of us become when we stop using a vehicle. Maybe, we forget that behind the wheel. Through the windshield, someone crossing the road can look like an obstruction delaying us for five or 10 seconds. Outside the windshield, the road looks very different.