Luffy Descartin
Cebu City National Science High School
In the Philippines, pedestrians have discovered a fascinating new sport: obstacle-course walking.
Around the motorcycle. Past the vendor. Under the construction scaffolding. Back toward the sidewalk. Then, suddenly, into the road. It is almost impressive how simply moving forward can require so much maneuvering.
I notice it most when I walk along F. Llamas Street. On some days, the sidewalk seems to have been claimed by everyone except the people walking on it.
A motorcycle here. A vehicle parked there. A vegetable stall stretching just far enough into the pavement. A metal post standing exactly where a human being is expected to pass.
So I move. And I understand why some of them are there.
The vendor selling vegetables is not trying to ruin my afternoon commute. The vendor is trying to make a living. The construction worker did not put up scaffolding for fun. But somehow, as a pedestrian, I’m always expected to adjust. Kita na lang ang mu-adjust.
We have normalized making pedestrians leave the space designed for them.
Cebu City has acknowledged the problem in less poetic terms. A 2026 report described many of the city’s sidewalks as narrow, obstructed, poorly maintained, or unusable, with pedestrians sometimes forced to walk alongside vehicles.
And that is where the inconvenience becomes something more serious. Because I can walk around a motorcycle. I can squeeze past a stall. I can step onto the road and return to the sidewalk when a vehicle comes. Not everyone can.
For an elderly person, a wheelchair user, someone with a visual impairment, or a parent pushing a stroller, “just walk around it” may not be an option. The sidewalk is supposed to remove that danger. Instead, we keep moving the pedestrian closer to it.
In 2024, the Philippines recorded an estimated 12.2 deaths from road traffic injuries per 100,000 people. Stepping into the road should not be the default workaround for a
blocked sidewalk.
So perhaps the problem is not simply that sidewalks are being obstructed. Perhaps it is that we have quietly decided that the pedestrian is the easiest person to inconvenience.
Nobody takes the sidewalk all at once. A motorcycle takes a little. A vendor takes a little. A construction barrier takes a little. A parked car takes a little. And eventually, the sidewalk is still there.
The pedestrian just isn’t. That is the strange thing about a right of way. Nobody has to officially take it away. We can simply make it inconvenient enough that people surrender it themselves.
What bothers me most when I walk down F. Llamas Street is not that I have to move around things, or even that I sometimes have to step onto the road. It is that I have become accustomed to it.
A sidewalk should not be an obstacle course. And a pedestrian should not have to apologize for walking on one.