Part One
THE road to ensure the safety of the roads in the Philippines is paved with good intentions. However, intentions are not good enough to concretize this goal.
More than half a decade into the implementation of a road-safety blueprint, the country is still struggling to cut road accidents by half in the next four years.
While there is no concrete evidence that the country is in a tight match against its targets, government officials and experts agree that road safety in the Southeast Asian nation is still a dream far from realization.
The government has no official data of the total number of road accidents all over the country for the past four years, after the public works department decided to fold down the operations of its traffic accident-recording analysis system in 2013.
But data from the Philippine National Police (PNP) showed the number of road accidents in the country is on a steady upward trajectory, which signals that there is something wrong with the government’s policies and endeavors to road safety.
In 2013 the PNP recorded a total 12,875 road crashes in the Philippines. This figure rose sharply by a fifth the year after to 15,572 road-crash incidents, which then ballooned by 57 percent to 24,565 incidents in 2015. Last year there were about 32,269 road crashes all over the country.
Numbers unknown
DATA from the Metro Manila Accident Recording and Analysis System, on the other hand, showed there were 109,322 road-crash incidents in the National Capital Region in 2016, a 14.33-percent rise from 95,615 road crashes the year prior. Human error—defined as negligence, physical challenges, or distractions—is to blame, according to the data provided by the government.
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that there are about 9,000 people who die in road crashes each year. This translates to about 24 deaths each day, or one every hour.
“Based on the data, trends and projections, we can infer that our roads really need proactive initiatives to make it safer. The department acknowledges the fact that there is still a lot of work to do to minimize road crash and fatalities,” Transportation Assistant Secretary Mark Richmund M. de Leon told the BusinessMirror.
Globally, about 1.25 million people die each year on the world’s roads as a result of road-crash incidents. It is, in fact, the leading cause of death for people aged 15 to 29, and continues to affect vulnerable groups, such as pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists.
“Road-traffic crashes, along with injuries and deaths, have a huge impact on the health and development,” WHO Technical Officer Ronaldo O. Quintana said.
Economic costs
ASIDE from their impact on human life, road accidents also affect the economy negatively.
World Bank Consultant Miguel Enrico C. Paala said road crashes in the Philippines costs the country about 2.6 percent of its GDP.
This figure jibes with the estimate of de Leon, who previously conducted a research on the economic impact of road crashes in the Philippines during his masteral studies in the University of the Philippines.
“Cost of lives lost, valuable economic time, medical cost and even the pain-grief-and-suffering of the victims and their families were quantified,” de Leon said. “In 2007 it was estimated that P3.5 million is average economic loss per fatal road accident.”
Without any corrections made to the accident statistics collected by responsible agencies, the cost of traffic accidents is about P2.5 billion, or $45 million each year, de Leon said, citing a study conducted by the Asian Development Bank.
“However, this is a gross under-estimation as it has been shown that there is too much underreporting of accidents,” de Leon said. “The estimate of the cost based on the health sector data amounting to P105 billion may still be on the low end, as there are many cost components that were not accounted for during the study. This cost is already about 2.6 percent of the Philippines’s GDP.”
Pillars tumbling down
IN 2011 the government implemented the Philippine Road Safety Action Plan with the goal of cutting road-crash deaths by 50 percent through 2020. But six years after it was launched, incidents still persist, and are moving steadily upward.
The blueprint has five pillars and spells out government departments and agencies involved with budget allocations amounting to millions of pesos for implementation.
First of the five pillars is to improve road-safety management. This program calls for the collaboration between the transportation, public works, interior and local government, and health departments for the development of policies and implementation of programs on road safety.
This also covers the sustaining of policies on free passage, an evaluation of the public-transportation monitoring system, the institutionalization of road-safety management though legislative enactment and partnership with the private sector, and the development, maintenance and integration of road-crash database systems by key agencies.
Likewise, the pillar calls for the exploration of other innovating programs that will help local governments to establish their own local road-crash database, the determining of ways to increase and to sustain funding to support road safety activities, and passage aºnd harmonization of laws pertaining to road safety. The first pillar also seeks to provide depth in researches on how to fill in the gaps in road safety, and address economic impacts of accidents.
To be continued
Image credits: Nonie Reyes