Driving to the east coast of Luzon and back over the Easter weekend involved a lot of mountain driving on rough roads. Five hours of being jolted around gave me plenty of opportunity to think about how roads, with their many advantages and problems, encapsulate many of the dilemmas of development.
I have always been an anti-car sort of bloke, but I’ll do my best to put the case for extending the road network. Broadly speaking, if you favor equality of access (one of the development set’s favorite phrases), roads are one of the most efficient ways of bringing this about. A mother from Baler needing to take a sick child to a referral hospital in Manila, a hotel owner wishing Baler were easier to for his guests to reach, and a traveler sick of bone-shaking buses, all have a right to say to the national government, “Look, you are responsible for running a national road network, for all Filipinos. This is the 21st century and the absence of a paved road connecting the nation’s capital with the east coast of Luzon is a disgrace. Get off your fat one and give us a road that isn’t going to collapse every rainy season.”
Against that, roads are powerful agents of homogenization—connect everything, and the whole lot starts to looks the same. The only thing separating the ugly ribbon development of Bulacan and Nueva Ecija and the neatly tended rural roads around Baler is the arduous mountain road. Smooth that out and you just make it easier for the cancerous growth that starts at Manila Bay to infect the beautiful and wild east coast of Luzon.
Roads have played a huge role in the logging that has denuded so much of the world’s forests and in destroying the lifestyles and cultures of indigenous peoples. Roads themselves destroy the environment. The outside shoulder of the road to Baler, for example, is continually collapsing as erosion eats into it (see below). This means that it has to be cut ever deeper into the hillside. The only solution would be to reinforce the shoulder (as is done in richer countries), but we are talking about 100 km of difficult terrain and a government that can’t even afford to pave the top of the road, so what chance is there of that ever happening?
Nevertheless, I suppose that one day the motorist will be able to glide from the skyscrapers of Makati to the beaches of Baler relatively easily. For the mother of the sick child, the hotel keeper and the bus passenger, the paving of the road will be a day of rejoicing and who am I to begrudge them? Still, something of the gentle rhythm of Aurora’s seaside communities will be lost forever, so I can’t honestly claim that I will welcome it.
Comments