The professionals

The recent spate of road accidents involving buses has the same sickening culprit: bad, irresponsible driving. The driver of the Pitbull Bus with license plate number TYF 328, which rammed into 11 motorcycles, a car, and another bus along Osmeña highway in Makati City two Fridays ago, conveniently and quite expectedly blamed faulty brakes or mechanical error for the accident.

But the Makati police later found the bus driver, Marlon Yandug Nacaytona, positive for shabu or crystal meth use after undertaking a drug test. It was his drugged driving, not faulty brakes, that led to the vehicular crash that left 13 people wounded.

We have a law, Republic Act 10586, that penalizes persons driving under the influence of alcohol, dangerous drugs and similar substances, and sets stiff fines as well as jail terms for violators. But it is one thing to enact a law and it is another thing to enforce it.

Even before RA 10586 was enacted there were already drunk driving ordinances in most cities, but the enforcement of such ordinances have been very lax.

Lax enforcement is why RA 10586 seems to have as many offenders. It’s no surprise since even ordinary traffic laws are routinely flouted here. When traffic officials try to enforce them, sometimes they even get beaten up or harassed by irate and undisciplined motorists.

Bad driving accounts for approximately 85 percent of vehicular accidents per year, according to a study by the Department of Transportation.

The Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA) said there were 31,811 accidents from January to August this year, including 6,614 non-fatal accidents and 25,061 incidents that resulted in damage to property.

MMDA data showed there were 618 accidents that occurred in Edsa during the same period, 509 of them resulting in damage to property.

Over 100 concrete barriers or lane separators along Edsa to mark the bus lanes have been destroyed in these accidents. Most of them were “self-accidents” or the fault of drivers, the MMDA said, because they were caught driving drunk, tired or distracted (using their cellphones), or they were speeding and made “miscalculations” as they entered the busway.

Bad drivers must be taken off our roads. If they are PUV drivers, their operators’ franchises and their licenses must be subjected to a thorough inspection, even revoked when their vehicles are involved in multiple traffic violations and accidents.

If you drive a bus, truck or jeepney, with the capacity to kill or maim a lot of people in an accident, you and your operator should certainly be held to a higher standard.

The government must look into the recruitment system of PUV and truck drivers and their training. It must enforce stricter rules for them. And there must be zero tolerance for drug use.

A surprise, pre-lenten drug inspection test conducted by the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency last year found 35 bus drivers and 17 conductors positive for shabu use.

It’s really scary to think that the guilty bus drivers were about to drive hundreds of commuters to their provinces for the 2019 Holy Week before they were caught; even scarier to consider how many actually escape random drug testing and how often certain bus and other PUV drivers actually drive under the influence of drugs or alcohol on a regular basis.

If you are a PUV driver, you own a professional driver’s license. You should live up to your billing —be professional. You should be better than the ordinary driver. Unfortunately, most bus and jeepney drivers are the exact opposite. They are the first to violate traffic rules, especially when no traffic officer is looking.

MMDA officials recently met with representatives of the DOTR, Philippine National Police-highway Patrol Group, Land Transportation Office, and Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board to talk about stricter enforcement of traffic laws.

The MMDA said they talked about suspending, revoking, or canceling the licenses of drivers with multiple traffic violations, among others, as well as establishing strategic checkpoints during curfew hours, and conducting random breath analyzer tests on drivers.

As a slogan once famously said: Just do it. We have a lot of bad drivers on our roads and the government just lets them keep driving.