Philippines places 69th in WEF’s travel and tourism index

The Travel & Tourism Development Index (TTDI) 2024 is the second edition of an index that evolved from the Travel & Tourism Competitiveness Index (TTCI) series, a flagship index of the World Economic Forum that has been in production since 2007. The TTDI is part of the Forum’s broader work with industry and government stakeholders to build a more sustainable, inclusive, and resilient future for economies and local communities.

The Philippines inched up a spot to 69th out of 119 economies in the 2024 edition of Travel & Tourism Development Index (TTDI) by the World Economic Forum (WEF). The TTDI measures the set of factors and policies that enable the sustainable and resilient development of the travel and tourism (T&T) sector, which in turn contributes to the development of a country. With an overall TTDI score of 3.84 (7 is best), the Philippines was one of the laggards in the region.

WEF_Travel_and_Tourism_Development_Index_2024

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Source: Business World and WEF

How street design helps reduce road accidents

UN Global Road Safety Week takes place from May 10 to 14.

A few weeks ago, a road accident went viral on the Internet. It showed a car speeding into a blind intersection when a motorbike crashed into the side of the car. Due to the strong impact, the biker was thrown up in the air and over the car. The biker was seen lying on the sidewalk with a badly injured leg.

The accident could have been prevented if only both parties had taken precautions as they approached the blind corner.

According to the Philippine Statistics Authority, there were 11,096 deaths in 2021, up by 39 percent from the deaths recorded in 2011. Road traffic injuries are the leading cause of death among Filipinos 15 to 29 years old. It is also a major killer among children.

Many of these deaths occur on urban roads and are preventable accidents caused by behavior as a result of street design.

Creating safe streets

Local governments in collaboration with designers, engineers and regulators are responsible for creating safe streets. As long as street designs encourage high speeds and prioritize automobiles and other motorized vehicles over pedestrians and other vulnerable users, streets will never be able to provide safe environments.

Many traffic fatalities are linked to street design. With the addition of speed, the conditions become more dangerous.

Some common causes of traffic accidents and fatalities include:

* Sidewalks that are not usable, narrow or non-existent which force pedestrians to walk along the road exposing them to danger.

* Pedestrian crossings that are non-existent or are inadequate.

* Lack of protection: Wide, multi-lane streets without refuge spaces expose pedestrians, especially the elderly, to moving vehicles for longer distances as they cross the street.

* Large intersections that are often designed for dangerous, high-speed turning. Lack of visibility results in poor navigation and assessment of different road users’ movements.

One effective strategy to address the problem of speed which makes road conditions dangerous is by adopting what is known as traffic calming.

What is traffic calming?

Traffic calming, first developed in Germany, involves implementing design features to slow vehicles as they move through urban, commercial, and residential neighborhoods.

It makes humans a priority over cars, something that runs counter to the idea that streets are made primarily for vehicles to travel on, and to get to their destination as fast as possible.

A traffic calming project is aimed at reducing and minimizing the risks posed by vehicles. It involves implementing road design features and strategies to cut down traffic speed and volume and allocate more space for pedestrians and cyclists. At lower speeds, the surroundings are more visible to the drivers and they have more time to react to unexpected events and can stop in a shorter distance.

Narrow lanes reduce speeds and minimize crashes on city streets by reducing the right of way and making drivers wary of traffic and adjacent users.

A traffic calming project can be something as simple as minor modifications on a specific street to a more comprehensive engineering redesign of a road network.

Traffic calming is “founded on the idea that streets should help create and preserve a sense of place, that their purpose is for people to walk, stroll, look, gaze, meet, play, shop and even work alongside cars—but not [be] dominated by them.”—Project for Public Spaces.

Examples of traffic calming strategies

Lane narrowing

Narrow lanes reduce speeds and minimize crashes on city streets by reducing the right of way and making drivers wary of traffic and adjacent users. Use the additional space for pedestrian space, cycle facilities, or green infrastructure.

Corner radius

Narrowing corner radii reduce vehicle turning speeds as well as pedestrian crossing distances. Minimizing the size of a corner radius is critical to creating safe and compact intersections.

Buildings and trees

Buildings at the right of way with articulated facades and windows indicate that a street is in an urban environment, not a highway.

Gateway treatments

Gateway treatments alert drivers that they are entering a slower area. This treatment may include signage, entry portals, speed tables, raised crossings, and curb extensions.

Mini roundabouts (or rotundas)

Mini roundabouts are round islands at intersections that serve to both reduce speeds and organize traffic, routing vehicles around the island rather than directly across the intersection.

Major considerations before traffic calming is implemented:

Is the area used by emergency, service vehicles, and school buses?

Is the area a residential, commercial, retail, entertainment, or other?

Are the users, the elderly, disabled people, and children?

Buildings at the right of way with articulated facades and windows indicate that a street is in an urban environment, not a highway.

Will the area be undergoing improvement?

Which roads are potential areas for the traffic calming?

Many countries such as the USA, the UK, Germany, Canada, Netherlands, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand and others have planned schemes to carry out the traffic calming process.

When road accidents occur, the usual response is to blame the driver, the cyclist or the pedestrian. It is about time we realize that our roads without traffic calming features may be the silent killer that we need to focus on. It is now up to decision makers, technical experts and communities to start saving lives.

Human life is our greenest resource, right?

Source: Inquirer

Donia, London: Fantastic Filipino food in the most soul-sucking part of the city

If you’re going through Carnaby Street hell, just keep going. Adobo will be your reward

They’ve renamed Carnaby Street. We’re supposed to call it “Carnaby” now. My cab driver said they’d reclassified it as a “quarter” so they could charge Carnaby Street rents in the less glamorous Soho side roads. Not, by any means, the most paranoid theory he expressed. Well, whatever they’ve done with the place, I think we can all agree it’s awful. It’s like a ride in a Soviet theme park, designed to convey the vacuity and decadence of western youth. It can only apparently be appreciated in mobs of 40, clad in identical puffa jackets, sharing two vapes and a litre vat of bubble tea.

Granted all the space in this magazine, I could not express the vileness of Kingly Court, the “dining destination” at the quarter’s joyless heart. I once had a temporary job as a security guard in a mall in North Carolina. I used to sit in the deserted food court in the small hours, entirely alone, wondering what the hell I was doing with my life. It was somehow a warmer and less soul-destroying place than Kingly Court. But the small clean room on the upper landing — light, bright and with whitewashed brick walls — is neutral and innocuous. Here is Donia, a small modern Filipino restaurant.

I’m not usually troubled by the acoustics of restaurants, but Donia’s are challenging. It’s a cruel and unusual battering with random fragments of unattenuated but enthusiastic food conversations. Probably what it’s like living inside Gregg Wallace’s head. I’d also like to express my undying enmity to the platoon of business bros at the next table whose knobs went all the way to 11 and were stuck on “transmit”. They obviously felt their squalid property transactions were “on a strictly need-to-know basis” but the bastards had decided we needed to know. There’s a special region of hell reserved for people like this. It’s basically them, me and an immersion blender for eternity.

The chicken offal skewer was easy to agree on and turned out to be half a dozen hearts on a stick with a dark, sticky sweet sauce. It was good, but I felt a little hard done by that they’d stayed entirely cardiac. I would gladly have extended at least into the hepatic or renal.

Adobo is regarded as a national dish of the Philippines — loved, celebrated and much debated. It’s a preparation of meat, poultry, fish or vegetables browned and then braised in vinegar and soy. The sour element is distinctive, unusual and stimulating. We Brits don’t use as much sour in our cooking as other cultures, and the effect on the palate can be every bit as transformative as the more familiar umami. Here, rather than a vast bowl of stew, they’ve made a smart little adobo of mushroom, which they’ve then used to make crisp fried croquetas. They were extraordinary, prompting me to reassess my life goals radically in favour of spending more time eating adobo.

We worry so much about eggs’ freshness here in the UK that we obsessively refrigerate them and panic when sell-by dates approach. The idea, therefore, of an egg brined for preservation is challenging to most of us. It calls to mind the pickled egg jar in the pub, only marginally less appetising than a pathology specimen. But we’re getting this catastrophically wrong. The Filipino way is to hard-boil and grate them on to a salad with chunks of fresh tomato. It looks like yellow snow, or what’s fashionably termed a “drift” of parmesan, but there’s no sulphurous egginess. There’s a very slight concentration of the yolk flavour and the salt picks it up further. Complex savouriness set off by a cool, crisp and neutral salad.

Kinilaw is a pickle of fresh fish in vinegar and citrus. In this case, the citrus is finger limes and the fish sea bream . . . but you guessed that. All fish in London at the moment seems to be sea bream. I’m not complaining, I just can’t work out if there can be any left in the sea. But all that fresh lightness was going to need a counterweight, and it came in the form of lechón.

Lechón is suckling pig, usually roasted whole with much effort spent over the crackling. The flesh is subtly flavoured and creamy, the skin a filigree matrix of gold, like the inside of a Crunchie bar. At Donia they serve just a piece, which by itself provoked moans of joy at the table, but it was as nothing beside The Astonishing Sauce. It was an extremely unprepossessing colour. What Farrow & Ball would probably call “Support Hose Beige” but it was made of puréed chicken livers, vinegar, soy and sugar. If you can imagine all the things you love about chicken liver parfait that elevate it beyond school-dinner liver. That. Poured over pig. This incarnation was also fired up with peppercorns. Shameless lily gilding that I can only endorse.

In the circumstances, it seemed just silly not to go the extra mile and order the fresh grilled half lobster, “ginataan”, humming with the scorched-shell redolence of a beach barbecue. It’s hard to do it justice. Imaging two alien xenomorphs wrestling naked in a drench of delicately fragranced coconut curry sauce. Lots of ferociously dangerous bits but strangely erotic.

The food at Donia was fantastic, new to me and a delightful revelation. Service was outstanding, and the wine list was smartly chosen to survive a firefight of new and unusual flavours.

If I could find a way, I’d like to be spirited into Donia, possibly through a back door and into the lift, wearing some kind of obscuring bag over my head so I didn’t register where I was. After that, all I’d need is a table away from the business bros and about a gallon of that lechón sauce.

Donia

2.14 Top Floor Kingly Court, Carnaby Street, London W1B 5PW

Starters: £3.50-£20

Mains: £22-£82

Sweets: £4.50-£12

Source: Financial Times