A recurrent refrain from the DILG there
displaying its abject failure at imposing its will on the LGUs.
Only in the previous dispensation, there was
then-Interior Secretary Eduardo M. Año
issuing a similar order, to wit: ““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.”
Año’s DILG Advisory No. 2019-0016 is but an iteration of
DILG Memo Circular 2007-001, which in turn sprang out of Section 10 of
Presidential Letter of Instruction No. 1482 Series of 1985 – harking back to
Marcosian times – that tricycles are “prohibited to operate along the national
highway or any road which allows maximum speed of more than 40kph, especially
on well-paved, high-speed roads, unless special tricycle/bicycle lanes on the
shoulder are provided, except to cross.”
Yeah, that is how long has this prohibition been ordered. And here I am,
ranting and raving just as long at the inutility of all DILG orders putting
trikes in their proper places.
Still, trikes lord over the highways – not to mention even the rural
dirt roads and urban alleyways. Truly, they are the kings of the road.
A constant in all DILG
orders: “Allowing them on main thoroughfares poses hazards to other motor
vehicles, the riding public, and even to the drivers themselves.”
Hazards on the
road, everyone knows that. 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 virtually hold
proprietary rights 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.
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.
How did this
come to pass?
Blame the
laxity of law enforcers rising out of their fellowship – in Tagalog, kapalagayang-loob –
with the drivers as members of the same socio-economic class.
Blame the
timidity of local government units to enforce the law in view of the “solid
votes” of the TODAs and JODAs. Which, in actuality, is more myth than might.
Blame that all
too ready scapegoat for everything wrong in this country – the culture of
impunity. As I extracted from an old piece here (Immunity index, June 21,
2012):
Culturization
though starts small, petty things, which often repeated, graduate to big
things. Like the culture of the lie attributed to Goebbels: If a lie is
repeated often enough, it becomes the truth.
Hence, if a
wrong is done often enough, it becomes not necessarily right, but altogether
tolerated, aye accepted as a no-wrong…
…[Jeepney
and tricycle drivers] flout the law with nothing more than their stupid grins
to flaunt, but nobody dares apprehend them. Not even reprimand them. And these
are but the “small folk” far below the ladder of power and influence in local
society.
If, in
their “lowness” they can get away with these small violations, so can the high
and the mighty get away with bigger violations…
…Ending the
culture of impunity in this country should be invoked at each unpunished
illegality, no matter how seemingly trivial.
Ending the
culture of impunity in this country demands the draconian exercise of political
will. By all persons in authority. With full respect to the rights of the
people, but of course.
Will. Will
not. A whale of a difference in the nut.
And we all
know who’s that.
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