Mike and his family have not visited their vacation home in Silang for at least three months now. Sheila quavers at the thought of going to work in San Pedro, Laguna, and coming home to Mandaluyong five days a week. Pedro was supposed to fix a half-opened window and a leaking roof in his mother’s now empty house, but he’s not about to repair anything soon.

They’re all in dread of a “killer” – what Pedro calls the “killer traffic” on the South Luzon Expressway. Imagine if Mike and his parents and his own young family, and Sheila and Pedro were to not stay away from SLEX, but join the thousands of others stuck on the road, night and day, along with Peter Wallace, who has been complaining the most loudly and frequently about the jamming of a highway that promises no light at the end of the tunnel.

There’s no light at the end of two years – maybe more, because it feels like more than two years since traffic has crawled and crept on a centipede’s feet. What’s happening, or not happening,
on SLEX? What’s the use of the other infrastructures if one becomes next to useless and all roads lead nowhere because there’s only so much road space between here and there?

The problem with SLEX, apart from the fact that it’s the slowest “express,” is that there just isn’t room for further widening. That’s geography, geology and topography in one big mess. An expert I consulted says the trouble has been aggravated by a lack of planning “from the start” and a lack of planning “for future expansion.” A double whammy, in other words.

Meanwhile, the human population keeps booming, the car population is not slowing (in a country where nobody throws away a 30-year-old vehicle). The Department of Public Woes may have hired or promised to hire 500,000 workers to “stimulate” the economy, but is there room, rhyme and reason for them to do anything about SLEX?

What DPWH could do is stimulate the billboard industry by putting up more billboards, specifically those of Secretary Ebdane, now among the latest officials to endorse his own product and projects on billboards along the highways, to entertain motorists while they steam and stew in their cars.