Yes, a lot of people think MMDA and its chairman Bayani Fernando are already being silly (for example, read the misplaced pink fences that I blogged about in 2006). However, the photo to the right demonstrates what I personally think is MMDA taking its silliness to a whole new level—a silliness that is downright wrong and can be equated to producing educational textbooks riddled with errors.

What you can see in the photo is a street sign on an intersection showing the names of the intersecting roads, pointers to a hospital and a church, and topped off with a location marker. You can find these signs (so far) along the stretch of C-5 Road from Katipunan Avenue to E. Rodriguez Jr. Avenue. While I haven’t seen any explicit indication that these signs are put up by MMDA (e.g., they’re missing the “MMDA: Government Property” text), the blue and pink colors are damning evidence, don’t you think? The particular sign in the photo above is located at the corner of Green Meadows Avenue and C-5.

If you look carefully at the location marker at the top of the post (see the detail to the right), it shows the logo of the City of Pasig and the words “City of Pasig” and “Barangay Ugong Norte”. This is the egregiously silly part. As anyone who cares about their geography knows, this intersection is fully within Quezon City, not Pasig. Ugong Norte is the southernmost barangay of Quezon City which might have been confused with the adjacent Barangay Ugong to the south, which is in Pasig City.

Knowing where the borders of the cities in Metro Manila are is one important skill that Metro Manila motorists should learn especially because of the Number Coding Scheme. Some cities have exceptions to this traffic scheme, like the fact that Makati City has no “window time” of 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. and the fact that Pasig City has no Number Coding at all. Ignorance of the borders have victimized many a hapless driver like the ones in Pasig City who were not aware that the boundary between Pasig and Mandaluyong lies smack in the middle of Ortigas Center (along San Miguel and ADB Avenues) and have thus fallen prey to kotong-hungry cops near Megamall. The fact that MMDA is placing street signs with such wrong information is not helping in this regard at all.

The photo also shows a somewhat less silly thing: C-5 is labeled as “C. P. Garcia Ave.” when this road is known to many as E. Rodriguez Jr. Avenue. Even Katipunan Avenue is not spared and you can thus see street signs in Loyola Heights proclaiming “C. P. Garcia Ave.”. (This leads to a conundrum where all roads at the intersection near the UP-Ayala Technopark are all labeled “C.P. Garcia Avenue”!)

This is not as silly as it looks since the stretch of C-5 from SLEX to Kalayaan Avenue in Makati is unambiguously known by the former president’s name so it seems that MMDA just extended it to cover the whole of C-5. I actually did some research because of this and what do you know, there’s actually a law that did give the Boholano president’s name to C-5: Republic Act No. 8224, which is “AN ACT RENAMING THE CIRCUMFERENTIAL ROUTE NO. 5 OR C-5 IN METRO MANILA, AS THE PRESIDENT GARCIA AVENUE, AND FOR OTHER PURPOSES” and took effect in 1996. The only problem now is, the name of the road is legally “President Garcia Avenue”, not “C.P. Garcia Avenue” if we want to be strict about it. Again, MMDA is not helping at all.

This brings me to a point that all of these renaming legislation is extremely silly. (There’s that word again.) There’s is absolutely no problem if the name of the elementary school is Matandang Balara Elementary School instead of some politico’s ancestor. And the memory of prominent statesmen like Diokno and Puyat can be better honored by politicians actually emulating their example instead of giving their names to streets! What all this renaming business only does is to confuse the hell out of people (like you would say “Sen. Gil Puyat Avenue” instead of the shorter “Buendia”, right?) and waste precious legislation time on false productivity. (So the Congress passed 200 bills? And more than half of them are renamings? Great.)

No to Bayani Fernando in 2010!

Update (February 20): I’ve just seen that MMDA has installed these street signs at the intersection of C-5 and Kalayaan Avenue. At the northwest corner we have “City of Makati” and “Barangay West Rembo” but on the southeast corner we have “City of Taguig” and “Barangay East Rembo”. While there’s a dispute between Taguig and Makati over Fort Bonifacio, I didn’t know that MMDA has the power to actually move barangays from one city to another! East Rembo has and was never ever the name of a barangay in Taguig.

Update (March 13): Somebody must have talked to MMDA since they (or someone else) removed the city/barangay markers on top of the signposts. So this leaves us with the name of C-5 as the remaining issue.