Home 
Spending the day of the dead to go to market in Daan Bantayan gave me time off from excavations and a chance to see this northern Cebu town up close. I was pleasantly surprised, no, amazed would be a better adjective, when I saw the new commercial and transport hub of the town. I cannot but admire the visioning of the former mayor (and now vice mayor) Malou Loot and her son, the current mayor, Sun Shimura, to develop a new urban core away from the old town center. Even my colleagues from the National Museum were awed by what they saw.
It probably helps that Daan Bantayan has so much space compared to other towns. But I also suspect the exposure that Malou had while in Japan taught her a thing or two about town planning and visioning, albeit not necessarily from some formal coursework. Experience, after all, is still the best teacher. Japan’s cities and towns are individual marvels of preserving the past (located in the town centers) while allowing commercial development to flourish in new corridors of development.
Unlike other congested municipalities and cities like Talisay and Minglanilla — and my favorite examples of unmitigated urban core congestion (not counting the confusion, exasperation and frustration when passing through on your way south) — the city of Carcar, there is still much space and time here to decongest a Spanish-era poblacion and establish a new urban core not far from it. I am reminded of Argao town during the early American period, when, by fait accompli, the Spanish pueblo was gradually left in elegance while the location of the train station about two kilometers further west, created a new commercial core because everyone else beyond Argao had to ship their goods to the capital through the trains.
By transferring the town market and adding a complex of buildings and facilities for transportation, wet and dry goods retailing and even a set of fruit stands complete with wide avenues, this mother-and-son tandem in Daan Bantayan has built a working model of how to start easing pressure on the urban core without waiting for it to be hopelessly congested.
This brings me to my difficulty in understanding why Cebu City’s mayor Tomas Osmeña finds it difficult to accept the offer of an LRT/MRT-based mass transport system that would cut through Metro Cebu and bring people in and out of this congested metropolis so that they need not live there to be able to work every day. This is how European, U.S. and Japanese cities are able to develop and use the labor force beyond its peripheries. With a rail-based mass transit system, people from Sogod and Dalaguete can spend thei days working in the cities of Mandaue, Cebu and even Talisay and go back home every night. Even those beyond these towns which are planned as terminal sections of the MRT can do the same, given the availability of a train that would take you less than an hour to reach the metropolis.
This is what Europeans and many Americans do: live in the towns and work in the cities, commuting every day through the purchase of season tickets, heavily discounted because they cover the entire year. I can say this because I too used a yearlong student pass to ride trains and buses on the way to the university during my graduate student days in Germany. I would commute daily from Bielefeld to attend session at Hannover, a good 30 minutes’ ride by train through about a hundred kilometers.
I agree with others that there is no incompatibility between the Rapid Transit Bus that Osmeña he proposes under the awkward name of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). Both can complement each other, with BRTs waiting at train stations. Having spent a good time in the U.S., I am sure he has seen this kind of combination between inter-city or inter-town trains with bus stations where they stop. If the need for the LRT/MRT is not felt now, wait till the congestion in Metro Cebu becomes unbearable. Then we shall look back to this time when the opportunity knocked and he failed to open the door.
