THE cost of President Rodrigo Duterte’s emergency traffic powers may run up to P1.15 trillion, or a third of the P3.35-trillion national budget submitted to Congress, but many of the projects do not have price tags while others are non-essential, Senate Minority Leader Ralph Recto said Saturday.
Moreover, Recto said the Department of Transportation’s list of “must-do” projects include “long-gestating“ subways and airports that will take years to complete but lacks simple road safety items that can be completed in a short time and save thousands of lives.
Recto said the simple purchase of ambulances and tow trucks could help ease traffic within months because “emergency teams could rush to accident sites to help victims and clear traffic jam-causing road obstructions.”
Aside from saving lives, emergency medical teams (EMTs) can reduce the time when traffic is stopped and a road is blocked by an accident, Recto said. “And when perpetually parked cars narrow the three lanes of a highway into two, a tow truck can restore that road’s full carrying capacity in minutes.”
“And this is more urgent in the Philippine setting where road accidents are a leading cause of death plus the sad reality that busy national roads are not fully utilized due to illegally parked cars,” he added.
“What use do we have a widened roads if these are turned into parking lots? It will be a waste of the money spent to build them and the time motorists who will be inconvenienced,” the senator said.
By Recto’s estimate, “hundreds” of mobile EMTs and tow trucks are needed. “In Metro Manila, we should have many roving tow trucks with disciplined government employees who will not mulct motorists and are dedicated to public service and not private gain.”He said the deployment of EMTs together with projects to improve road safety, like street lighting, should be considered in the master plan of projects that can be launched by virtue of the emergency powers being mulled.
“The rising human toll from accidents compel this, especially in Metro Manila whose streets have long been disaster zones,” Recto stressed.
Last year, the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority recorded 95,615 traffic accidents. “That’s an alarming 262 incidents a day, or one every five and a half minutes,” Recto said.
In MMDA’s tally, accidents killed 519 persons, injured 17,103 others and caused 77,993 cases of damage to property. “On injuries, that’s 342 buses filled with accident victims,” he lamented.
Traffic accident data collection nationwide is spotty with different agencies giving varying estimates.
Based on 2013 data from the Philippines’ Department of Public Works and Highways-Traffic Accident Recording and Analysis System, 1,513 died due to road accidents that year.
The World Health Organization issued a higher estimate of 10,379 fatalities in 2013.
On the other hand, data from the Philippine National Police’s Highway Patrol Group showed 11,285 traffic accidents reported during the first half of 2015.
Recto said non-urgent projects in the DOTr list, like the construction of training rooms in one DOTr agency and the purchase of non-essential computers, could be put in the back burner and replaced by ambulances and tow trucks.
Under the list, the road sector was given a tentative budget of P58.6 billion, bulk of which would go to the construction of two bus rapid transit lines in Metro Manila and “none for road safety.”
Noting the dearth of police cars in Metro Manila and in other major cities, Recto said the government should consider buying more PNP patrol cars “so that erring drivers can be pursued. That will not only be anti-crime but also anti-traffic.”