What the Election Season Means to Traffic

Roads.  Destroying perfectly good roads.  Putting asphalt on perfectly good cemented roads.  Lots of road construction.  Lots of government spending.  But for what?

It's a country tradition.  Election in the Philippines comes after road construction.

Right across our store, they're putting asphalt on our nice road.  It was supposedly cement, but the congressman's pork barrel was said to have lacked funds to complete their re-cementing of our cemented road.  So now, we have a long street in various stages of construction, our segment of which is in asphalt and a couple of inches higher than the rest of the street.  The rest of the street had been re-cemented already, during the past few weeks.  I wouldn't say they repaired anything, at least in our segment of the road.  It's just, well, re-cementing.  Only now, cement can also stand for asphalt. 

Now why are they doing this?  They could have used the money for better things than this grand misuse of taxes.  Some say this is just an act to appease auditors come the next months or years, to say that they were using pork barrel for construction, even though this particular case has no benefit to the people.  Some further say that with every constructions such as this, there's another construction of a nice private house or something out of sight.  Given that, it's no surprise we don't have enough funds.  When we're constructing more than what we are budgeting for, we're bound to get problems.  Especially if its the overpriced roads we love to hate, and feeling helpless about it.