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BERNARDO M. VILLEGAS January 14, 2011 More, Better, and Sooner I had much cause for celebration last December 30, the penultimate day of 2010. In traveling to my hometown, Sto. Tomas, Batangas, for a family celebration, I had the greatest pleasure of using the just opened SLEX to STAR (Calamba-Sto. Tomas) expressway. This was the culmination of a wait of more than ten years for the construction of this road which is just about five kilometers traversing the foothills of the majestic Mount Makiling. Believe it or not, this extension of the SLEX connecting Calamba to the STAR Expressway had been "inaugurated" five times by three Presidents. For one reason or another (mostly right-of-way legal problems), it took more than ten years to complete it. You can't imagine the hundreds of hours I had wasted being caught in traffic along the narrow road connecting Calamba to Sto. Tomas, Batangas where you have thousands of employees of factories and of college students traveling during peak hours. This was also the only route taken by buses and trucks going to Quezon, Bicol and to the Batangas port. What could have taken as long as half an hour to travel on that fateful day of December 30 took me exactly ten minutes. This pleasant experience gave me the hope that under the leadership of very competent and honest people like Secretary Rogelio Singson of the Department of Public Works and Highways and of Secretary Jose de Jesus of the Department of Transport and Communications, the next five years will improve on our past record of building strategic infrastructures that will enable the economy to grow at 7 to 9% in GDP annually. As regards, infrastructures--especially roads 2 and bridges--the slogan should be more, better and sooner. I have no doubts that the present Administration will be able to deliver, especially as they implement aggressively the PublicPrivate Partnership arrangement. Abundant financing, both local and foreign, is available for infrastructures. What is needed is for the Government to improve implementation by removing the obstacles that result from red tape, corruption, and incompetence. As regards the last cause of delay, I sincerely believe that much more can be done by really competent public officials to follow strictly the principle of eminent domain when private property owners put roadblocks (no pun intended) to the construction of infrastructures for the common good. Thanks to the thorough research work done by the foreign chambers of commerce in coming out with their publication called Arangkada Philippines 2010 (A Business Perspective), all of us have been provided with a list of the roads that should be constructed in the next ten years (hopefully sooner). Some of them are in different stages of completion. These are the Cavite Coastal Road extension, the Manila Skyway Phase 2, the NLEX to C-5 Connector, the NLEX to Tondo Connector, and the TPLEX (Tarlac to La Union). In addition to these, more should be started as soon as possible and finished in record time. These are the Cavite-Laguna (CALA) Expressway, the Cebu-Mactan 3rd Bridge, Cebu-Bohol bridge, Davao to General Santos expressway, Danao to Talisay expressway, Cebu, LRT 1 provincial bus terminal to Cavite, Manila Connector (Skyway to Tondo), Metro Manila Tollway C-6 (Lakeshore Dike to NLEX), MRT 7 provincial bus terminal to Bulacan, NAIA Expressway (Phase 2)--NAIA to Coastal Road, North East Luzon Expressway, SLEX 4 (Calamba-Lucena) and STAR northbound lanes (Lipa-Batangas City). I enumerate these identified roads to be constructed in the next six to ten years to alert both local and foreign investors what are the solicited projects that they should consider in which to 3 invest. As the Aquino Administration already has announced, unsolicited projects are being discouraged. There are more than enough projects considered essential for the success of the Medium-Term Plan of the Government. This list will also encourage both national and local officials that have special interests in the regions in which the roads are located to actively lobby for the immediate implementation of these projects. The foreign chambers have done their job of singling out these projects. Other business people and NGO officials should lend their voices to the clamor for more and better roads and to get them to be completed sooner. I hope we can put the sad experience of the Calamba-Sto. Tomas expressway behind us. All of us deserve better. For comments, my email address is [email protected].