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Monday, April 25, 2005
Children’s deaths prod call to clear sidewalks, skywalks
A CEBU City councilor wants to clear the sidewalks and clean the pedestrian overpasses or skywalks in the city, so children will use them instead of the road and avoid accidents.
Councilor Edgardo Labella came up with the proposal after noting a recent study that showed four of every 11 Filipinos who died every hour in traffic-related accidents in the country were those who walked on the road.
Many obstructions on sidewalks and skywalks force children to trudge on vehicle lanes, exposing themselves to the risk of being run over.
The study revealed that 2,250 children were killed and 93,854 were injured in traffic accidents all over the country in year 2003.
While the number of vehicles has doubled the past 12 years, that of children who died in traffic accidents soared by 130 percent.
“As in other parts of the country, some road accidents…in Cebu City have unfortunately resulted in the deaths or injuries of children either as pedestrians or passengers of motor vehicles,” Labella said in a proposed resolution.
One way to address the problem, he said, is to rid sidewalks and pathways of garbage, open utility holes, parked vehicles, vendors’ stalls and other barricades.
He urged the City Traffic Operations Management (Citom) to strictly enforce the Traffic Code, especially the provision about obedience to traffic control devices by both pedestrians and drivers.
Also, Labella is asking his City Council colleagues to urge the Department of Energy (DOE) to hold a dialogue with three big oil companies (Shell, Caltex, Petron) to resolve the alleged “under-recovery situation” they are in.
Labella hoped that by so doing, DOE will persuade the oil companies to roll back prices so the industry will attain a “fair price environment.”
Labella said oil companies are “perennially in the mode of recovering losses,” especially during upswings of world crude prices.
But he believed this was a “lame excuse” because pump prices do not go down when world oil prices plummet.
Besides, oil firms are supposed to have an inventory that is good for 90 days to serve as “hedge supply” to be sold at reasonable prices, he said. RHM
(April 25, 2005 issue)
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