An ordinance which would require transport trucks to deliver only their goods at nighttime is one of the solutions being considered by Mayor Pablo Ortega to help ease traffic problems in the city proper.
The Mayor, who is bent on smoothing the flow of vehicles’ entry and exit in the city, noticed that delivery trucks park surrounding the old market to unload their deliveries during rush hours, adding complications to motorists plying their routes, particularly carrying office workers and students from 7 to 6 Mondays to Fridays. He would also propose that only small cars and jeepneys would park in this vicinity.
Public Utility Vehicles’ passengers have long complained of the traffic jam around the old market. Adding to their predicament is the unscrupulous parking of too many vehicles and undisciplined tricycle drivers, sneaking in between bigger vehicles. At the corners of P. Burgos and Ortega Streets, no traffic aide is assigned to manage crisscrossing vehicles, it was also learned.
Ortega St., aside from Quezon Ave. is the most used streets in the city proper. It caters to passenger jeeps from the north of the city and tricycles, adding to private cars and delivery trucks and vans.
The Mayor, together with City Police Director Pedro Obaldo, Jr., are said to be also looking for possible conversion of one-way-streets. “All these are only trial routes,” he said.
“I have talked with the Governor (Manuel Ortega) and Cong. Victor (Ortega) to go on with a terminal in the old PNR compound (Philippine National Railway) and to convert the railway into a road for buses from the north that would exit at the Philippine Rabbit Station, straight to the National Highway in the south,” he clarified.
The Mayor added that the expansion of the San Fernando Bypass road to San Juan town will be completed this year. “President Arroyo has promised to release P56-million for its completion when she came last December.” The Bypass road extension span from barangay Biday to the said town and would minimize vehicles traversing through the city proper.
He also expressed difficulties on rehabilitating commercial establishments in the city proper built without requiring their owners to build as well, their own parking spaces due to the obsolete zoning ordinances approved by past mayors in the 1950s, ‘60s and 70s.
“It’s difficult for us present officials because they were not able to expect that San Fernando will get this growth,” he said, “owners should have built their buildings and their parking spaces proportionate with the number of their clients but traffic accompanies progress,” he ended. |
