NO SAFETY CULTURE
It’s really beginning to look a lot like Christmas in the Philippines.
Besides the cool weather and the likes of Jose Mari Chan and Mariah Carey on constant airplay, the blinking colors of Christmas lights and parols (lanterns) are accompanied by a daily sea of white and red lights on major thoroughfares like EDSA and C-5. The increase in road congestion has reduced progress to a crawl, day or night, dampening some of the holiday cheer.
Yet on the eve of Dec. 5, 2024, the Katipunan flyover in Quezon City was host to a gruesome scene – a 10-wheeler truck plowed into dozens of cars and motorcycles that had been sitting in traffic in front of Ateneo de Manila University. Some of us will spend our holidays in sorrow after four were killed and 30 were injured by the mangled mess of metal.
The near-zero speeds that many of us thought would spare us from such a catastrophe were no match for tons of truck hurtling down a flyover, allegedly because of the long-used reason of nawalan ng preno (brake failure). Authorities arrested the 10-wheeler’s driver, Richard Mangupag, the next day after he had fled the scene.
Stop the guessing
Just over a week later, a photo of an overturned car on Katipunan Avenue near U.P. Town Center, about a kilometer away from the site of the Dec. 5 disaster, went viral – the photo’s contributor said the driver allegedly fell asleep at the wheel.
And then there was the white Ford Everest that mowed into 12 other vehicles at the corner of U.N. Avenue and Taft Avenue in Manila last Dec. 9, injuring six. The driver claimed he had lost control of his vehicle as he approached the intersection.
Besides the shocking visuals and obligatory police reports, there remains no definitive way to establish the causes of these road crashes and potentially stop these from happening again.
“The sad reality is that there are deaths on the road, but we’re not learning from them,” said lawyer and Automobile Association of the Philippines (AAP) trustee Robby Consunji in an exclusive interview with Inquirer Motoring.
“We’re speculating that the driver was sleepy, the truck was overloaded, the road was a downgrade,” he added. “Even if you show me dashcam footage, it would all be speculation. You and I can argue back and forth – we will continue to act on haka-haka.”
No accidents
Consunji said another major reason for all this carnage is how Filipinos view safety and risk, particularly the bahala na mentality.
“There’s no safety culture,” he said. “Safety culture is being completely aware of the condition of your vehicle, that your insurance is updated, etc. We have a different framework of shared risk and there are cultural aspects of bayanihan, ambag-ambag, abuloy and the like, along with the patronage of “Punta ka kay governor or punta ka kay congressman.”
“These are not necessarily bad, but these are not making us a careful culture,” he added. “Imagine what it would be like if these things weren’t there.”
Indeed, the World Health Organization (WHO) has long stopped calling road crashes “accidents” because it views these incidents to be entirely preventable.
Deadly travels
The WHO said in its 2023 Global Status Report on Road Safety that around 1.19 million people were killed in road crashes worldwide in 2021 – these included 11,096 Filipinos, according to the Philippine Statistics Authority.
More chillingly, the WHO said road crashes are the leading killer of young people aged 5 to 29 globally, as of 2019. And based on the latest Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA) data obtained by Inquirer Motoring, there were 62,723 road crashes in Metro Manila from January to November 2024, resulting in 332 fatalities.
This equates to at least one Filipino killed every day on our roads – and the year hasn’t even finished yet.
“More and more people have video and can record on the spot,” Consunji said. “The visibility of these viral videos has increased, despite the MMDA saying that there are fewer road crashes this year. That’s why the MMDA data was contrary to everyone’s gut feel.”
Transport safety board direly needed
Consunji said the MMDA conference that he attended this month included discussions with the Land Transportation Office, the Philippine National Police (PNP) and various transport groups.
“There was no assurance that there would be a program to reduce road crashes,” he said. “It was an appeal to all sectors to police and regulate themselves, and just to release the pressure among all stakeholders.”
Despite this, the government is committed to cutting road-traffic deaths by 35 percent in 2028 under the latest Philippine Road Safety Action Plan. This covers five pillars, namely road-safety management, safer roads, safer vehicles, safer road users and post-crash response.
Consunji once again raised the idea of establishing an independent transport safety board that could competently and thoroughly investigate incidents on the road, in the air and out at sea.
“AAP recognizes the need for a transport safety board,” he said.“The AAP board agrees that we need to find a way to get more data-driven policies. That’s the reason I said that we get someone to investigate it on a per-event basis, scientific and forensic.”
As Inquirer Motoring reported last September, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. vetoed on July 2022 a bill that would have established the Philippine Transport Safety Board (PTSB), saying that it would not only duplicate the functions of other agencies, but also cause confusion on which agency would have investigative authority.
But the confusion already seems prevalent – Consunji said the PNP admitted at the MMDA conference that its crime-scene investigators did not have the equipment to probe road crashes, while the LTO said that it did.
“I was shocked that they admitted that,” he said. “The takeaway of that conference was that there is a shared responsibility.”
What can we do?
Senate Bill No. 1121 revives the push for a PTSB, which would fall under the Office of the President and serve as the primary investigative body in any transportation incident.
Meanwhile, I have been pushing for adaptive driver assistance systems (ADAS) to be standard in all new cars sold in the Philippines, similar to legislation introduced this year in Europe. The life-saving features of ADAS can intervene to completely prevent a collision, sparing everyone the expense and misery of a road crash.
And Inquirer columnist and inclusive-mobility advocate Segundo Romero Jr. listed in his Dec. 17 column entitled “Fixing Metro Manila’s road safety crisis” the various solutions that can be implemented.
These include institutional reforms like a centralized database for tracking vehicle inspections, violations and crash histories, as well as partnerships with groups like the AAP to intensify awareness of the horrors of road crashes. He also proposed preventive measures for high-risk vehicles, such as mandating additional inspections for large commercial vehicles.
All this seems excessive, but the money involved is absolutely staggering.
The WHO said road crashes generally cost up to 3 percent of a country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which is a measure of an economy’s strength. Using the World Bank’s computation of the Philippines’ 2023 GDP, dealing with the aftermath of road crashes cost an estimated P730 billion of our taxes that year.
Given the furor over the zero subsidy for Philhealth in 2025, perhaps some of that rage could also be directed here – saying “s**t happens” is cold comfort to anyone who lost their loved ones and their savings from the chaos of the streets.
Especially because all road crashes, whether in viral videos or not, are entirely preventable.
