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BAGUIO City: The traffic mess caused by the lax
implementation of traffic regulations has caught the ire of Mayor
Reinaldo Bautista Jr. that he threatened to pull out police
auxiliaries assigned to the Baguio City Police Office-Traffic
Management Branch.
In his weekly Ugnayan with
reporters he expressed “great frustration” that simple traffic
violations are hardly implemented by the BCPO-TMB, resulting in
congestion of the city’s already narrow streets.
The mayor said he had instructed
Police/Senior Supt. Moises Guevarra, city director of the Baguio
City Police Office (BCPO) to reshuffle the composition of the
BCPO-TMB to make it more efficient.
“The traffic mess has been a
longtime problem of the city that we need to solve ourselves,”
Bautista said.
Should there be no improvement in
the traffic situation in the weeks to come, Bautista said the 50
police auxiliaries would be transferred to the Office of the Mayor
under its Public Order and Safety Division (POSD).
In effect, traffic management
would then be transferred to the POSD, which is now working on the
city’s antipeddling, antisquatting and antigambling drives.
But Police/Senior Inspector
Samuel Bumangil, chief of the BCPO-TMB, denied the mayor’s
allegation.
“We have not been remiss in our
duties,” Bumangil said, adding that the increase in the number of
apprehensions for last month is an indication that they have been
performing their duties.
He even showed his
accomplishments claiming that in the month of May, about 1,777
apprehensions were made and that this almost doubled in June to
3,080.
But in response to the mayor’s
observations, Bumangil said they already doubled their efforts to
ensure the smooth traffic flow in the city, yet inaction on several
requests they made to some divisions under the Office of the Mayor
has affected their efficiency.
Besides the fact that traffic
enforcers were continuously harassed by erring drivers and are not
rendered legal assistance if complaints are filed against them at
the Peoples Law Enforcement Board, Bumangil said their request
before the City Engineers Office for a reprogramming of traffic
signal lights has not been acted upon up to this time.
As a result, he said the job of
traffic law enforcers is spread not only in the apprehension of
traffic violations, but also in traffic management, which is made
more difficult by defective traffic signal lights.
--Thom F. Picaña
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