Two members of the Cebu Provincial Board (PB) want to keep the highways mud-free, so they’ve come up with a draft ordinance to require drivers and operators to scrape the mud off the tires of trucks. Presumably, violators will face some form of penalty if the ordinance gets passed. But how will local authorities enforce it?
Would traffic enforcers have to watch out for trucks with muddy tires, in addition to over-speeding drivers and counter-flowing motorcycles? How much mud would there have to be on the tires for the truck driver or operator to be considered a violator? Can local officials enforce the ordinance through checkpoints or would they equip enforcers with binoculars and motorcycles so they can spot violators early and, if necessary, chase them?
This is not to mock the ordinance proposed by PB Members Sun Shimura and Thadeo Jovito Ouano. I’m sure they mean well. An accident on the muddy roads of Medellin that injured one of his staff was one of the events that compelled Ouano to file the proposal, USJ-R interns John Paul Fajardo and Rolyn Mae Jumao-as reported. But it sounds like one of those measures that, for all the good intentions behind them, end up with a stack of local laws “more honored in the breach than the observance.”
It brought to mind other legislative proposals and actual ordinances I read about in SunStar years ago, like an old Cebu City ordinance that prohibited people from putting their feet up on the seats of movie houses. How widespread was this behavior that a councilor felt moved to legislate against it? Was there no other public need or concern that more urgently deserved the council’s attention?
In July 2014, Mandaluyong City approved an ordinance that made it illegal to share a motorcycle, unless you were first-degree relatives. Again, I’m sure the local legislators who thought of that meant well. Then-mayor Benhur Abalos, according to a GMA News Online report, said the ordinance was needed to help curb crime. But in order for the ordinance to be enforced, motorcycle riders would have had to bring, say, their marriage certificates to prove that the person they shared the ride with was their spouse. Would traffic enforcers have to stop every motorcycle that carried a passenger, to find out if the riders were spouses, siblings or parent-and-child?
I find these sorts of local stories moving, strangely enough, because they show us just how unusual our communities can sometimes get. Reading about what towns and cities worry about and what public goods or services they think they need connects me to them, in a way, helps me differentiate one community from another. These are stories I wouldn’t get from the national broadsheets, because it’s toward the capital and the central seats of power that their gaze is directed. These stories won’t land in the supposedly national newscasts either, unless the news director finds them odd enough or they rise to one of those trending topics on social media.
For providers of local news to work, they have to do better than their readers’ neighbors. At least that’s one suggestion from a report of the US-based Solutions Journalism Network in May 2016. The group spoke with rural communities on the border between New Mexico and Colorado, as well as Montana. They found that readers were put off when their local news coverage was “too negative, too focused on crime and corruption” and paid too little attention to the local economy. They’re on to something, I think.