CITY planning and zoning functions and activities are intended to serve as means toward the accomplishment of desirable social and economic ends. Although the planning of the growth of cities and towns in our country in an orderly fashion began in the twentieth century, city planning as an art and science dates back to the middle ages.
The origin of the more recent and widespread need for the urban planning movement may be found in the very rapid growth of the US urban population, along with the remarkable evolution in the mode of transportation and commercial intercourse.
Unfortunately today, Cebu has adopted the individual transit form of urban transportation, which excluded in the road design a bicycle lane and a coordinated walking or running area. The present road design is purely for automobile, taxi and other motorized vehicles.
When will our civic and political leaders be stimulated to take a wider interest in community problems such as road design?
The island of Cebu is still a developing island where there is a need to coordinate civic developments. Majority of Cebu’s urban dwellers do not own an automobile and the aim of the city planners should seriously consider that bicycle and walking be a part of the over-all Metro Cebu road network.
Cebu City has become a city of street vendors. There must be a way to accommodate these street vendors to keep pedestrians from using the road instead of the sidewalk. It’s the poor and middle class inhabitants who need the sidewalks, which is a free form of transport.
Likewise, the bicycle is as fast as a car in urban trips less than eight kilometers.
Metro Cebu communities are dynamic and must be sufficiently flexible in structural design to provide, if necessary, for sudden internal growth and orderly expansion by its limits.
Metro Cebu’s cities and towns may be considered a corporate entity offering cultural, social, and economic advantages superior to those offered to residents in competing neighboring island urban, suburban, rural or resort areas.
Like a business entity, a city or town as a whole must prosper if it is to continue as a going concern.
The marketing program of Cebu Gov. Gwen Garcia to draw and attract business to the Province’s towns and municipalities is thus of great concern to municipal and city planners.
As a requisite to good city or municipal planning, an inventory should be taken of the area’s physical and economic growth potentials, and of the resources which underlie and justify its existence. The natural growth of Metro Cebu will be chaotic if and when our local political leaders fail to implement a physical survey that involves the preparation of an official Metro Cebu Plan containing the pattern of the streets in use and for expansion, the lay of land in respect to elevation, sources of water supply, and character of the soil.
It’s a political quandary as to how Metro Cebu’s political leaders will cooperate to bring about a master plan. Congressman Tomas Osmeña, hopefully, will submit an enabling law creating the Metro Cebu Development Authority basically to develop a comprehensive Metro Cebu Master Plan, wherein a careful analysis of the physical and economic survey data should furnish the basic information upon which the master plan is to be found.
This plan, comprehensive in it scope, must be sufficiently flexible to permit growth and economic adjustment to dynamic changes caused by environmental growth. As a rule, the master plan provides a clear view of the existing pattern of public streets, arterial highways, traffic flow, and the relative adequacy of Bus Rapid Transit, light rail transit, water, air, and inter-city highway transportation.
In the preparation of the master plan, special attention must also be given to intra-city and suburban transit lines and to the adequacy of the transportation network system in relation to present and potential traffic demands.
The basic role of the authority is not to overlap the functions of the local political leaders, but only to prepare a well-conceived master plan which is flexible, provides guided control over the future growth of Metro Cebu, retards neighborhood blight, looks towards the elimination of slums, and stimulates and guides private development in order to attain the greatest good for the greatest number among those who have a “stake” in the community.
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