Criss-crossing the natl highway
E-trikes and e-bikes remain largely unregulated by the government.
The fact that users don’t have to register them nor obtain a license to drive them has become a selling point for these smaller electric vehicles.
But the drawback of this lax regulation is starting to show as officials struggle with keeping them off the main roads.
With likely tens of thousands of e-trikes already proliferating all over the country, transport officials are scrambling to come up with harmonized guidelines for how to regulate them effectively.
Land Transportation Office Chief Vigor Mendoza II has said they are targeting to submit new guidelines to Transportation Sec. Jaime Bautista by next week.
The current law allows e-cars to travel within the barangay roads, and take other local and tertiary public roads.
The LTO and the Land Transportation Franchising & Regulatory Board currently allow e-cars, even pedal cabs and motor cabs, to use only feeder roads, at the risk of some indistinct penalty like being stopped and sent back.
The sense of this policy is dictated by two regulations, motor registrations and public driving safety.
The requirement to register e-cars, and obtain a driver’s license makes sense.
Metro Manila road users are clamouring for equal treatment by the government of all motor vehicles.
But the problem is not far from us in Metro Dumaguete, Sibulan, Bacong, and Valencia as we have built bypass highways.
In most stretches of the highway, e-cars have been blocked off, or prevented from accessing the highway to the other side.
This poses a serious traffic hazard for the metro local governance. Already, traversing bypass roads creates daily traffic jams, especially on school days and rush hours.
The challenge is to have the local government coordinate with their counterparts to draw up a comprehensive traffic plan that will oversee time and motion studies of vehicles.
Anticipating the inclusion of e-cars and drivers with a license, the plan might include them as well in the survey.
E-car owners, make sure to secure your license and registration so you avoid the inconvenience of being stopped on the road.
Criss-crossing the University Town
A greater problem of regular motorists, with young children in schools, involves the absurd rules that local traffic officials impose in the entrances to and exits from schools.
Imagine a toddler attending school inside a campus where the three- to four-year-old has to wait at a designated “pick-up area” until his parents come for him. This pick-up location makes our toddler vulnerable to coming and going traffic on a main campus thoroughfare. That is for ordinary schooldays.
It gets worse when there’s a school activity wherein the parents/guardians are invited, and asked to bring potluck food or snacks, chairs or mats for a family picnic. Problem is, these parents are required to attend the activity, but are not allowed to park on campus since they secured vehicle passes only for entry to drop-off and pick-up (with no parking privileges).
Have you ever been invited to a party where the host required you to pay, for parking in front of his house? Quite ridiculous, right?
That’s exactly what happened when the parents (believing there was going to be an exception to the policy that day) were invited to an official school activity, required to bring food, but then security personnel, upon orders of higher authority of the host school, issued the guests/parents tickets for parking fines!
We learned later that a letter from the Department requesting for special permission to park due to the official school event was disapproved, unbeknownst to the parents.
What may be the school’s reason for coming up with expensive tariff to enter or park in its premises? Is it the economics of raising revenue, on top of its already-expensive school fees? (Such policy is ironically causing serious traffic jams on City streets before and after classes, as parents avoid the exorbitant parking fees).
Have our values changed drastically to materialism and discrimination which necessarily project an elitist image incongruous with the intrinsic values of the school?
A caution to our schools to review their traffic rules so that we continue to project ourselves as a hospitable, cultured, and intellectual University Town, not just in terms of developing goodwill with their clients — the parents and students — but also with their concerned and loyal alumni and townsfolk who lament the degeneration of time-honored codes of simplicity, inclusivity, and humility — values that I believe genuine Oriental Negrenses continue to live by.
________________________________
Author’s email: [email protected]
