Of speed limiters and road sharing
Atty. Jerome G. Neri
The Scrutineer
THERE is a proposal going around in Manila asking the government to make it mandatory to install electronic speed limiters on public utility buses. Over 10,000 signatures now have been gathered and, in fact, Sen. JV Ejercito has filed a bill to make this mandatory.
This is a knee jerk reaction to that bus accident in the skyway in Manila that killed a number of people last December. Installing speed limiters is neither the solution to the problem nor will it help in a significant way in saving the lives of the riding public. As I mentioned in a previous column, speed was only one of the factors that caused the accident. There was another bus accident in a mountain province in Luzon recently that killed a number of people, too, including TV personality “Tado.” It seems like speed was not a factor in this accident.
My point here is that in road accidents, there are other factors apart from speed that have to be considered, and the biggest factor of them all is driver error. The driving profession must be strictly regulated just the way the legal and medical profession is regulated. A lot of lives are in the hands of people in the driving profession.
ROAD SHARING. A petition has been filed before the Supreme Court calling for road sharing by Atty. Antonio Oposa Jr. He is regarded in the legal community as a pioneer in environmental law. This road sharing principle envisioned by the environmentalist-lawyer is to convert the roads of Metro Manila and eventually roads in all major cities into covered sidewalks, urban vegetable gardens and bicycle lanes, leaving only 30 percent of the road for vehicles to encourage the public to use trains or buses.
From where I sit, what he actually really wants is to convert our roads into parks. His principle is that “those who have less in wheels should have more on roads.” That principle is wrong because those who have less in wheels do not need roads, they need wheels.
As I was driving along from Redemptorist Church to my house in Banilad, I tried to imagine what if the roads were reduced by 70 percent and realized that only one lane would be left on major roads such as Escario St. and Gorordo and Archbishop Reyes Avenues. This petition is impractical.
However, I do see the point of Atty. Oposa: our cities are starting to get really polluted with vehicle emissions. Something has to be done right now.
The problem is government. There are no real incentives for environmentally friendly cars. The use of Autogas for example, which was pioneered by the taxi operators here in Cebu City, was, a few years ago, given a hard time by then DOTC secretary Mar Roxas, who said the pros and cons of Autogas should be studied first. He was ignorant of the fact that there are already numerous studies showing its environmental benefits.
Autogas is being used in Europe and other more developed countries since the 70s. In the United Kingdom, there are tax incentives for motorists who convert their vehicles to Autogas.
Another simple way to reduce greenhouse gases is to encourage the use of smaller vehicles with smaller displacement engines. The problem is that in our country, no one likes to use small cars with small engines because our roads destroy these cars.
