The accident that claimed the life of a female college student at a flyover along Archbishop Reyes Ave. in Cebu City last Tuesday, April 14, 2026, was just one of many that could have been avoided with the right interventions.
Braille Nichole Kwek was just a week away from celebrating her 19th birthday. A mechanical engineering student of the University of San Carlos, she was a student leader, a math wizard, a beauty queen and a campus writer.
That afternoon, she took a motorcycle ride that collided with an ambulance that counter-flowed while transporting a patient. The impact threw her and the driver off the motorcycle.
Observers noted that the ambulance and motorcycle drivers didn’t seem to clearly see each other’s approach, leading to the collision. Accordingly, the flyover’s bend angle is such that driver visibility has been compromised.
This is not the first time that such an accident occurred on our flyovers and bridges.
A night before the incident, a 44-year-old man also died while driving a motorcycle that crashed at the Mambaling flyover along the southbound lane of Natalio Bacalso Ave. in Cebu City.
In May last year, a 56-year-old woman and a two-year-old girl who were passengers of a van that figured in an accident at the Cebu-Cordova Link Expressway passed away hours after they were brought to the hospital.
While reports said that the accident was caused by the van’s busted rear tire, it nonetheless calls for an immediate intervention such as a road safety audit (RSA).
RSA is a systematic audit on roads, flyovers and bridges by an independent and highly technical team. It identifies and examines potential safety hazards, generating a report to improve road safety and minimize accident likelihood and severity.
The Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) supposedly requires RSAs both for new projects and existing structures with high accident potential, focusing on structural integrity and traffic hazards while taking into consideration structural components, inadequate signage and dangerous approach roads.
Way back in the 1990s, I remember how our engineers did these things when I was employed with the Metro Cebu Development Project, then chaired by former Cebu City mayor Tomas Osmeña, who was very strict in ensuring that the bridges we built followed the right angles that made approaching vehicles clearly visible to each other’s drivers from a safe distance.
With Cebu City currently experiencing around 400 to 500 road accidents monthly, it is high time for RSAs to be conducted by the DPWH regularly on our roads and bridges, especially those noted for having had fatal accidents.
This is not the first time that I’ve written about our need for RSAs. When I wrote about it sometime ago, a city councilor messaged me with an assurance that he will study and highlight it in the City Council. I’m still waiting for him to fulfill his promise.
Meanwhile, let’s urge DPWH to exercise its mandate on conducting RSAs on our roads, flyovers and bridges.
The last time I inquired from the University of the Philippines’ National Center for Traffic Studies which has a battery of experts on RSAs, a lady official there told me that she’s not aware of any RSA done in Cebu City for many years now.
