Taking trikes off highways

“FOR SAFETY reasons, no tricycle or pedicab should operate on national highways utilized by four-wheel vehicles greater than four tons and where normal speed exceeds 40 kilometers per hour.”

So, said DILG OIC-Secretary Eduardo M. Año only last Tuesday as his agency reiterated its call to all mayors to prohibit the operations of tricycles and pedicabs along national highways.

Furthered he: “Allowing them on main thoroughfares poses hazards to other motor vehicles, the riding public, and even to the drivers themselves…The regulation of tricycles and pedicabs on national highways is, therefore, to the best interest of everyone.”

Personally, I have had three brushes with tricycles – each time I am on the right side of the law, but ending up just the same paying for the damages on my cars which ran to tens of thousands of pesos. The trike driver always going scot-free. Little, if perverse, consolation to me that on two occasions, the tricycles were total wrecks. ‘Dana.   

Hazards on the road, everyone knows that, Sir. Not the least the trike drivers themselves. Still, on any day, any hour of the day in fact:

Tricycles traverse stretches of the national highways in direct violation of the law, being confined only to crossing them.

Tricycles keep to the innermost – and therefore, fast – lane at processional speed holding traffic and raising blood pressures of drivers behind them.

At other times, tricycles – especially the lowered sporty types – turn the national highway into an Indianapolis 5000, unmindful of all other vehicles.

Tricycles are loaded to the roof with passengers and goods as they ply their merry way along the major roads and highways.

Tricycles have made street corners, many times even whole streets as their terminals, complete with sheds and karaokes.   

Include in this group too the padyak-sikels who lord it all over city streets – making terminals atop bridges, counterflowing traffic at will, do pick-and-drop passengers wherever, whenever.

Want to undertake a study of anarchy in Pampanga’s principal cities?

Go downtown San Fernando from 6:30 in the evening onward and drive through a maze of jeepneys, tricycles and tri-wheelers parked, idling or slowly moving in all directions, in utter contempt of the right of way.

No, Sir Año, a reiteration of that call to local government executives, embodied in DILG Memorandum Circular 2007-001 yet – all of 11 years now – is way past due date.

Strict enforcement is the call of the hour.

Sir Año, you have the guts – if not the gall – to recommend to the Commission on Elections to disqualify candidates included in the narco list from running in the 2019 elections. Even if no cases have been filed in court against them. 

Surely, you have the grit to impose administrative sanctions on the LGU who continue to be remiss in the enforcement of a lawful order.   

For a start, your DILG should stop dispensing all those Seal of Good Governance even on LGUs that fail to implement DILG MC 2007-001.

It makes your agency look ridiculous giving awards of excellence in governance to LGUs that miserably fail even in such a rudimentary task as keeping tricycles out of the national highways.  It’s stupid as it can ever get.

Will. That is the key here, Sir Año.

Where the mayors will not, fearful of losing the votes of the tricycle operators and drivers associations – aptly named TODAS – in the coming election year.

May Año will. If only befitting the discipline of his military upbringing.