The Land Transportation Office last week trained a total of 135 participants in a seminar to deputize traffic law enforcers.
Not every policeman has the power to enforce traffic laws. The law says only LTO-deputized agents have the power to apprehend traffic violators, and issue Temporary Operators’ Permits.
Traffic enforcers and personnel from the Traffic Management Office, empowered by means of a local ordinance, can enforce traffic laws, but they cannot issue TOPs. They can only issue citation tickets which the traffic violator has to pay at the City Treasurer’s Office.
Traffic enforcers are fast becoming a rare breed. By news accounts, that was the first, and perhaps the only, seminar for this year to deputize traffic law enforcers to assist the LTO in enforcing traffic laws, rules and regulations.
We wish the new deputies well and look forward to seeing them on the road one of these days.
But we also wish there were more of them. At the rate the motorized vehicles are filling our streets, the number of traffic enforcers seem to be getting fewer and fewer.
In 2009, the number of motorized vehicles registered at the LTO Dumaguete alone reached 57 units every day on average. That’s 20,805 new vehicles added to our streets in one year, and that’s just in Dumaguete.
Clearly, you will need more than 135 additional new traffic enforcers (and that’s spread out in the entire Negros Oriental) just to cope with the added number of vehicles they have to watch for.
The rate at which the motorized vehicles are added to our streets is fast outpacing the ability of our LTO to provide them their registration papers. Because of this, you see a lot of vehicles roaming around the City with “For Registration” plates or without any plates at all.
We may never even get to identify the motorcycle without a license plate, if it is used in the commission of a crime.
We need order in our streets. We need more traffic enforcers out there.
