Another deadly road accident in Cebu City calls to mind the need to improve our road infrastructure for safety’s sake.
I refer to the couple who were happily walking hand-in-hand along Gen. Maxilom Ave. early this week when a Toyota Fortuner SUV suddenly swerved from the opposite lane and struck them from behind. The woman, a Cebuana, died instantly after she was dragged by the vehicle while her partner, a foreigner, was injured. The two were planning on getting married and moving to the US in two months’ time.
Of course, the driver who tried to flee from the scene was to blame for the accident. Caught by pursuing barangay tanods a kilometer away, he was found to have been intoxicated by alcohol when tested with a breathalyzer. He has since been detained and will be charged with reckless imprudence resulting in homicide (for the woman’s death) and physical injuries (for the man). The driver admitted to having fallen asleep, resulting in the fatal crash.
But what could have prevented or at least mitigated the accident’s dire consequences is better road engineering.
In the first place, the couple were seen in the CCTV camera footage as having been walking on the edge of the road. Had they chosen the sidewalk path instead, the accident’s effects would have been minimized since the road’s raised curb seem sufficient to reduce the impact of the vehicle crash. While the SUV did mount the street gutter and curb at high speed, its force on the victims would not have been as damaging than when they were openly exposed at the edge of the road.
If the sidewalk was user-friendly enough, it would have attracted the two to stroll happily on it instead of on the street. But as the video of the accident shows, the walkway is poorly-lit, cluttered and uneven due to obstructions.
Unfortunately, this particular aspect of the road infrastructure in Gen. Maxilom Ave. is quite common in Cebu where vendors or even houses of informal settlers occupy sidewalks which are supposed to be kept clutter-free and safe for pedestrian movements. When walkways are blocked, pedestrians are pushed off from safety and exposed to vehicular traffic.
The same holds true for roads that have no raised walkways or those with blocked storm drains. In many areas, in fact, there are roads that have no sidewalks at all. Worse, some of these roads have no gutters or drainage facilities either. When it rains, flood waters accumulate at the sides of the road, causing a safety hazard by forcing pedestrians to walk at the center, directly into the path of moving traffic.
A road is usually designed such that its center is slightly higher than its edges. As such, rain water naturally runs off into the side gutters and drainage. However, when drainage is clogged or totally absent, puddles of water form at where pedestrians are supposed to walk. To avoid wading into leptospirosis-rich runoff waters, people move towards the middle of the road, exactly where traffic accidents often await.
Even without the Road Safety Audits that the Department of Public Works and Highways have yet to do in Cebu, local government units ought to address this problem to avoid more accidents. Especially now that the rainy season has come, there should be an inventory of roads requiring engineering interventions that must be done at once.
Let the road accident victims be our wake-up call to improve the safety of our roads and walkways.
