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True to form in his advocacy for the environment,
Cardinal Gaudencio Rosales has called for every vehicle to have a
container for trash to avoid littering the countryside with the
debris of one’s everyday activities, a common dismaying
occurrence. The summer season of picnics and outings, travels and
excursions is accompanied by a proliferation of discarded plastic,
paper, glass, food leavings and other throwaway items. You can
always tell where the trippers have been by what they have left
behind. Respect for one’s surroundings, particularly the beauty of
nature or the pathways and byways as well as streets and highways
that people travel on is breached with tons of litter.
Indeed, our road use behavior is
quite anti-environmental. Smoke belching keeps recurring despite the
emission tests given every time a license is renewed. This is
particularly true of public transportation or commercial carriers
where maintenance seems to be cursory. How else does one explain the
repeated instances of brakes not holding, vehicles going out of
control, tires blowing out, breakdowns and other preventable vehicle
accidents on our roads and highways? When lives are lost or people
maimed, then we have a case of poor maintenance. Unfortunately, it
happens daily and no lessons seemed to be learned.
Other destructive practices on
our highways are putting up billboards that obscure nature, distract
the traveling public, promote consumerism and encourage unhealthy
pastimes like eating junk food.
And what about the perilous
location of dwellings, stores, and restaurants right on the edges of
thoroughfares? One mistake by a driver and a vehicle rams into one
of these establishments, causing death and destruction. If there is
no law forbidding structures at unsafe distances from highways and
streets, there ought to be one and it should be implemented. Notice
how any new street or highway immediately has a market or commercial
area right on its edge for motorists and pedestrians, enough to
cause a traffic snafu or an accident. The reason is no one wants to
plan or to exert effort to go to market or do business or errands
that will involve walking a distance. Everyone wants to do whatever
about six inches from the vehicle they are traveling on or the
nearest (if at all) walking distance. These bad habits are unheard
of, intolerable and prohibited everywhere else but not here.
Another ignorant or willful
destructive habit is overloaded, overweight vehicles. These are
vehicles whose weight destroys the roads and which are explicitly
forbidden. But time and again vehicles travel overloaded by willful
disregard of rules by both the owners and drivers. They not only
ruin roads unconscionably but have been known to defy authority. Not
long ago, a group of truckers with overweight vehicles, with malice
aforethought, broke into the North Luzon Expressway with the purpose
of getting away with overloading by intimidating the expressway
authorities, ignoring stop signs, trying to ram their vehicles on
company equipment and other bullying tactics. The expressway patrol
was obliged to use force by shooting the tires of the overloaded
vehicles. This was the most brazen resistance to a rule that is
meant to keep roads at their optimum best.
Meanwhile ignorance by motorists
on roads and highways causes them to switch lanes haphazardly, drive
always on the left side even though they are slowing down others and
finally, overtaking from the right which is dangerous because it is
the driver’s blind side.
I will not get into the topic of
the devil-driven buses on EDSA which defy all rules and in the
process endanger everyone.
Somewhere in our education
system, in our governance and for the sake of long-term civil and
social good behavior, there should be an effective lesson on how to
use roads and how to think of the community that one must share them
with.
miongpin@yahoo.com
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