Vans plying the Cotabato-Davao route are not fast-moving vehicles…they are low-flying coffins. Nobody's really given a damn about it. Until now.
Accounts abound as to how the vehicular accident involving
a passenger van in Pikit, North Cotabato just this Friday really happened. But that’s already the end of the story. The real story lies in the series of events that
led to this man-made disaster, another manifestation of the culture of
disasture.
The following is just a short list. Please feel free to add:
1)
Passenger vans
have proliferated in the Cotabato-Davao route in the last five years. This privately operated business compensated
for the lack of a government public transport system.
2)
Operating
passenger vans is lucrative business.
With vague government regulations on van fares, operators are relatively
free to dictate through their own cartels on how much the public should be
paying.
3)
Because nobody
checks on the carrying capacity of passenger vans, four people are squeezed on
a row designed for three, plus extension seats are added.
4)
The hazy
distinction between passenger vans and vans for hire complicate the competition
for passengers and space on the road.
5)
The lucrative
nature of this unregulated business also provides a lucrative source of income
for anybody who can provide space for van terminals that are also unregulated.
6)
This lucrative
nature also extends to traffic enforcers who instead of checking operators’
licenses, road safety, speeds and number of passengers inside the van, are
establishing rapport with operators and drivers with pansigarilyo and other
forms of bribery.
7)
Drug tests for
van drivers are non-existent with the unregulated nature of the business; thus providing
a free flow of the drug route.
8)
With media so
engrossed with the peace process, politics and gossip (election season
notwithstanding), little space is left for road safety and other seemingly
irrelevant issues which if summed up occupies a much bigger space than the
first two P’s.
9)
What’s with
field trips that pump people’s adrenaline up? An eyewitness related that the
young people inside this particular van were jeering and giving their thumbs down
sign after overtaking other vehicles. Shouldn’t
schools also give safety briefings to the drivers and the students before
letting them go on and risk their lives with great abandon?
10)
Where are the
parents? I know we are all at the height
of grieving and say it’s not a time to blame.
Forgive me this early if you wish. Again some
sense has to be knocked into our comfort zones for us to wake up. Have we as parents really inculcated in the
minds of our children how to stay safe on the road? The concepts of Yin-Yang? How too much excitement and euphoria usually
brings in the equivalent intensity of negative energies? That they too, have the right to tell the
driver to drive carefully?
Previous vehicular accidents should have already pierced
the collective consciousness of the public. I still wonder if this Pikit
incident would really wake us all up. But
the culture of disasture continues. (We
are not yet talking about the devil drivers plying the squeakingly new concrete
highway from Cotabato to Lebak. Accounts
say that recent vehicular accident-related deaths in the area were just negotiated by the operators).
It is enraging to think that while government is so inept
in addressing this issue, we citizens have not done enough as well.
Cotabato
City
1
March 2013
##
Aveen Acuña-Gulo wrote a column “The Voice” for the Mindanao Cross from 1991-2006. She likes to challenge stereotypes. “Don’t worry about my opinions,” she says. “It won’t make a dent to the conventional."
She also drives. "I'd like to think that it takes basic intelligence to know the rules of driving and safety on the road. You just can't make any vehicle run without knowing these things,” she said.
