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Tuesday, October 12, 2004
Editorial: Disciplined jeepney driving needed in Angeles
By Ding Cervantes
TRUE, the streets of Angeles City will never get wider to accommodate the growing number of smuggled and unsmuggled vehicles, unless the dirt spaces flanking them are concreted for vehicle use, although this would deprive pedestrians of their right to space and life. The inability to widen thoroughfares is the favorite explanation of local government and police officials for traffic gridlocks that occur here and there in the town.
But I've always maintained that the wide ratio between road space and number of vehicles erupts rather infrequently and that on normal days, the problem is more on the lack of discipline mostly of jeepney and tricycle drivers, the lack of traffic law enforcers and enforcement, the lack of the imagination of traffic planners.
At last, however, someone thought of building a rotonda down the Abacan bridge from Barangay Balibago, so motorists crossing each other's paths no longer do so dangerously, although there is need to remind them with signboards who has the right of way.
It was also well that barriers were installed along the Balibago highway through the new Robinson's mall, easing traffic catarrh that was feared with the opening of the mall.
Alas, there is one problem that has remained: the lack of discipline of public utility drivers and the lack of law enforcement. For example, while the new mall has provided space for jeepneys to pick up and alight passengers right at its front to allow free traffic flow along the highway, jeepney drivers, for reasons beyond the grasp of sanity, often ignore the space to use the highway's outer lane as their virtual terminal to wait for passengers or to disgorge them.
At night, jeepneys continue to ply routes with their vehicle headlights off. At Astro park in front of the main gate of the Clark Special Economic Zone, jeepneys drive on the opposite lane that is rightfully your path, and they dare give you hostile looks if you do not yield to avoid a head-on collision.
There is, quite understandably, a sweeping irritation over the lack of order in the ways of jeepney drivers, particularly among local media, so that when jeepney drivers announce they would hold a strike for this or that reason, local newsmen inevitably ask why commuters and other motorists can't unite and hold, too, a strike to protest jeepney driving anarchy.
One time the jeepney drivers called for a press conference to announce they would be holding a protest move demanding the rollback of fuel costs, one of them proffered an explanation. He said that there are too many jeepneys plying the city routes, so that competition for passengers has made drivers less respectful of traffic laws, their instinct to get that passenger along the route at any cost prevailing. So the problem boils down to government issuing too many franchises.
I tend to be a little more sympathetic with the lowly paid traffic aides in faded uniforms, exposed to the whims of weather and the toxic exhaust of motors, but there is no doubt the morale in their jobs has no boost. They are not short of blowing their whistles, but unless they really confiscate the licenses of traffic violators, their whistling will remain ignored as it has always been.
What is it that prevents them from being rightly hostile to habitual traffic offenders? Do they need assurance from the city's traffic authorities that there is no need for fear and reluctance in clashing with errant drivers?
Still, the burden of the traffic aides would weigh less if only jeepney drivers had discipline, a commodity that should be installed in the mind. I would suggest that traffic authorities in the city meet with officials of jeepney drivers associations and schedule, say, a three-hour seminar for their members on traffic discipline. Get a competent speaker who can penetrate through the souls of the drivers so that at the end of the seminar, they get to raise their right hands and vow, on the Bible if need be, to live their driving lives with more conscience and respect for a country that is in bad need of order.
(October 12, 2004 issue)
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