“The many years the TRO has been in place wasted a lot of time to make the system mature”
AT LONG last, the Supreme Court has lifted its Temporary Restraining Order on the No Contact Apprehension Policy of the MMDA and other cities in the Metro area.
The lifting, however, is only partial and limited to the 22 national roads in the NCR.
The other parts of the TRO remains in place for the other urban centers throughout the country. Right from when this TRO was issued a few years ago, I never really quite understood why the SC did it considering that all countries all over the world have been utilizing the advances of technology to help in traffic management for many years.
Furthermore, the NCAP was administrative in nature and if there were certain legal infirmities, maybe the SC should simply have pointed them out so these could have been corrected. Even now, it seems that the SC may not be sold to the idea because it has limited its implementation to national roads.
This could limit the benefits and also prevents full evaluation for possible improvement.
For instance, traffic engineers must evaluate the best placements of the CCTVs in order that whatever videos are taken of a violator, it would clearly show the traffic infraction committed.
The 22 national roads may not enough for full evaluation of the program because many traffic violations are committed on city roads.
This project, to be very effective as a traffic management tool, must be implemented throughout the entire road system of the NCR or any LGU.
The many years the TRO has been in place wasted a lot of time to make the system mature. Although we are not exactly starting from scratch, we have a lot of catching up to do.
With due respect to the honorable court, it should perhaps leave traffic management to the professional traffic engineers.
We are actually very late in embracing modern electronic technology to help solve many of our road problems.
What are some of the benefits of the program?
With a state of the art traffic CCTV system installed all over the NCR, this will tremendously reduce the need for warm bodies on the road. Another obvious benefit of the program is the reduction of street corruption being committed by enterprising traffic enforcement personnel.
But most of all, it forces our undisciplined drivers to behave on the road regardless whether they see a traffic enforcer or not.
There will always be that threat of apprehension 24 hours a day.
This early, the initial observation has been positive, according to the MMDA. But we should expect some problems.
For instance, apprehensions will include drivers from out of town.
Is the current MMDA enforcement capability prepared to handle this situation?
What sort of arrangement has been made with the LTO so that out of town violators could still be served their ticket violations and pay their fines?
New traffic rules are also necessary to handle unforeseen and new situations.
This is what is meant of developing the engineering and enforcement infrastructure to be able to implement this program efficiently without any hitches. If this is not done, all sorts of problems will happen.
Then last Monday, MMDA issued a surprising statement promising to be fair in its implementation of the program which was unnecessary.
My understanding of NCAP is it has nothing to do with fairness.
The traffic offense is mainly dependent on what the video taken is showing. If the video taken clearly shows a violation, then the driver is penalized. If, however, the video shows no violation, then the MMDA has no recourse but to treat it as such.
It cannot be dependent on the interpretation of the personnel viewing the image.
This is the reason why there must be sufficient CCTVs installed so that there will be no room for misinterpretation.
Otherwise, it will be a never ending problem. That is also the reason why the image of the violation must accompany the notice of violation.
It will take some time to make the program as perfect as possible.
But we have to remember that although NCAP is a big help, it cannot singlehandedly solve all our traffic problems. Discipline is still necessary.
