Selfishness, on an individual and community level, is inching us closer to ‘carmaggedon’

“Gulangan.” “Lamangan.” “Isahan.” These are all words in the vernacular. They carry negative connotations, attempting to describe the dark, selfish side of humanity. In English, they mean, roughly, “putting one over the over,” or “moving ahead at the expense of others.”

We are all guilty of it. One time or another in our lives, we may have “needed” to commit acts befitting those words in order for us to accomplish what we perceive as important tasks, or even just simply to survive.

There is, however, a big difference between using such wily acts to survive and using “gulang” to get ahead of everyone who has been patiently in line in the tollbooth.

The former calls you to defend your right to life. The latter just makes you an a-hole who has made it a habit to trample on everyone else’s rights.

“Lamangan” and “isahan,” in particular, were mentioned by Dr. Felicitas Soriano, who was quoted by this author in 2007 in her capacity as the president of the Philippine Psychiatry Association.

She said then that Filipinos have a “destructive culture” when it comes to traffic rules and regulations, and “lamangan” or “isahan” were just a normal part of the Filipino driver’s psyche.

Aurora Corpuz Mendoza, a psychologist from the University of the Philippines who conducted a study on road safety in 2006 (investigating the behavior of 334 private and public utility drivers in Metro Manila), confirmed the prevalence of this selfish attitude of motorists when she pointed to the study findings, which included the three most numerous traffic infractions: (a) illegal counterflow, (b) failure to give way while turning, and (c) tailgating.

Foreigners who have been exposed to the ways of our streets, particularly in Metro Manila and other urban concentrations in the country, do agree that Pinoy motorists seem to have made it a career to be ahead of everyone else when it comes to driving.

During a brief visit to Manila many years back, an up-and-coming Formula 1 driver Jenson Button wryly commented, “I can see lots of Formula 1 driving out here.”

Now, when every driver wants to be first in the same spot at the same time, that spells danger on all sides. Raffy Castillo, MD, recounted on Oct. 31, 2015: “On Wednesday this week, it took us almost two hours to get to the airport just coming from Makati. We missed our flight to Davao where I was to give a talk that evening…. The two hours stuck in the traffic and the extra hour at the airport while my staff and I were trying to rebook our flight seemed like eternity and my adrenaline level must have shot through the roof, creating some havoc in my body.

“Getting caught in the kind of traffic jams we have in Manila these days can really pose a serious threat to people at risk for heart attack or stroke.

“Authorities should place heart defibrillators in strategic locations in traffic-prone areas like Edsa and Villamor Air Base. If someone has a heart attack in a traffic jam, the victim neither can be brought to a hospital soon enough, nor can expect an ambulance to squeeze its way through the traffic,” said Castillo.

Filipino medical anthropologist Michael L. Tan, an Inquirer columnist, wrote in his Nov. 30, 2008 column: “Traffic management experts throughout the world have talked about the three Es needed…: education, enforcement and engineering. It’s a good framework to use, but…culture plays an important role, too.

“To make culture fit in with the other Es…let’s use a fancy term, ethos, which refers to a disposition, attitudes and values that we have.”

Colonial baggage

The city seems to never sleep. Many times, traffic congestion continues even past midnight.

Prominent Filipino urban planner/architect and environmentalist Felino A. Palafox Jr. provides the historical context to this traffic mess that we’re stuck with right now.

Palafox analyzes that we’re suffering from the “colonial baggage of Intramuros (inside the walls), and Extramuros (outside the walls) from the Spanish times, a segregation of the rich and the poor.”

He went on: “King Philip II of Spain (for whom the Philippines is named after) decreed that all colonies of Spain must be planned in a similar manner: the town plaza, the church and the city hall. Regardless of income class, Filipinos come together every Sunday—at the market, the church and the plaza.

“The downside of it is within the hearing distance of the church bells (the Baja de las campanas), only the ilustrados—the rich and powerful—were connected. They were in Intramuros. Outside the Baja de las campanas (Extramuros) were the Indios, the peasants and the Sangleyes.

“Unfortunately, by 2021, it’s going to be a 500-year-old concept.”

In a nutshell, Palafox is reiterating that this 500-year-old urban concept has become outdated, inappropriate for the millions of motorists squeezing their vehicles into a limited city space.

Palafox cited as a classic example the Makati central business district. “The Makati CBD is like the town plaza, center of trade, commerce and jobs, and yet the employees of Makati are priced out of the housing standards of Makati.

“So, the daytime population of Makati is 11 times the nighttime population. People working here in Makati spend 3 to 6 hours a day in traffic because they cannot afford housing in Makati. That is an imbalance.

“And then we have the big houses inside these gated communities and subdivisions. In the American Planning Association in 1998, we were shaming big houses and mansions in the middle of the city as having large carbon footprints because these village residents were arrogating to themselves prime urban land resources, preventing more families to live closer to their places of work, encouraging more urban sprawl to encroach into the forest and the farms.

“And now the poor employees of Makati who might want to walk or bike to their places of work have to go around two to four kilometers of walls of the gated communities and cemeteries. (It would be nice) if we could just share the roads of our villages (to decongest the traffic jam during peak hours).”

Palafox shared that Bel-Air Makati has opened up a certain street to ease the traffic condition in main thoroughfares.

Gated military camps, gated subdivisions

Palafox, in a way, has called on multisectoral action to open up roads parallel to Edsa, the country’s busiest thoroughfare, and the barometer and symbol of our traffic woes.

“With all the parallel roads to Edsa inside gated military camps, gated government offices, gated subdivisions, gated cemeteries, the government should start opening these roads.

“We from the villages should be patriotic enough to share our roads. And we should open up our gates during peak hours. We are part of the problem, we can be part of the solution,” he said.

In other countries, he disclosed, posh villages opened up their roads to the public.

“Lamangan” and “isahan” are all akin to the other attributes of a selfish individual and society. “Greed” is a related word, and so are the seven deadly sins.

Now, there are fearless forecasts from the automotive industry that by 2018, 500,000 new automobiles every year will join the already jampacked streets of the country.

If we need to go anywhere, we have to start implementing a revamp of our own individual psyches, akin to perhaps granting “emergency powers” upon our better selves so we can change our “state of mine.”