There are few things stranger than driving through your own city and discovering that a public road has a closing time.
I was reminded of that again Sunday night.
It was still about 10 minutes before the announced 10 p.m. closing, yet the steel gates on Filmore and Dian Streets in Palanan, Makati were already shut. A line of vehicles that should have been able to continue straight through the neighborhood was forced to divert to Bautista Street, cross over to Dian, then work its way back toward Filmore just to reach the only remaining opening.
Even that was only half a gate wide. One side remained closed, forcing vehicles entering and leaving Palanan to share a single narrow lane.
This was on a quiet Sunday evening.
If this is what happens on a Sunday night, imagine a weeknight rush, a torrential downpour or an emergency requiring an ambulance or a fire truck.
The question is no longer whether these gates inconvenience motorists. They clearly do. The more important question is why public roads have to be padlocked in the first place.
These are not roads inside an exclusive subdivision. They are ordinary city streets built with public funds and maintained with taxpayers’ money. Yet every night someone locks the gates, pockets the key and effectively decides who gets in and who gets out.
We are told the gates deter crime but this explanation deserves to be examined.
Roads exist to connect communities, not divide them. Government spends billions building highways, bridges and local roads because mobility is essential to economic activity and public safety. Then another layer of government blocks access to those same roads after dark as though restricting movement were an acceptable substitute for policing.
It is a strange way to run a city. The consequences go beyond inconvenience.
The rainy season is here. Flooded streets can force motorists to look for alternate routes without warning. Locked roads reduce those options precisely when flexibility matters most. In an emergency, even a minute or two can make a difference. Nobody should have to wonder who has the key while an ambulance waits outside a steel gate.
Nor have the gates eliminated crime.
A customer at Noona Neena, a restaurant along Bautista Street, returned to find the window of his car smashed and his belongings stolen. In another incident, a woman had her cellphone snatched outside the same establishment. Both incidents happened after the gates had already been closed for the evening.
The gates were locked. The criminals apparently were not.
Neighborhood businesses are paying a price as well.
S Piano Bar on Dian Street has been serving customers for nearly 20 years. It survived the pandemic, only to find itself dealing with a different problem. Walk-in customers have become less common because access to the area becomes restricted at night. Regular patrons now plan their departures around gate schedules instead of simply enjoying an evening out.
That may not seem like much to policymakers, but ask any small business owner whether making it harder for customers to reach your establishment is good for business.
Then there is the matter of publicly money.
How much did these gates cost? Who proposed them? Who approved them? Who supplied and fabricated them? Was the procurement competitive? Could the same funds have been used for better street lighting, additional CCTV cameras or more visible police patrols?
Those are not accusations. They are questions every taxpayer has a right to ask whenever government spends public funds.
Steel gates may provide a sense of security. Whether they provide enough actual security to justify the cost-in public money, restricted mobility, lost business and possible delays during emergencies-is another matter altogether.
What troubles me most is how normal all this has become.
Nobody should think it is ordinary for public roads to close every night. Nobody should accept that the solution to criminality is to restrict the movement of law-abiding citizens while hoping criminals stay away.
Government has many responsibilities. Keeping public roads open and keeping them safe should not be mutually exclusive.
A city that starts padlocking its own streets every night is not solving a problem.