Road safety forum: Can we trust our city streets again?

For many months after the road accident in February 2009 that killed Ateneo Grade School (AGS) student Julian Carlo Miguel “Amiel” Alcantara, his siblings “would rather snorkel in the open sea than walk in the city streets,” according to their father.

“They were so scared to walk on the street. It still hurts. It took us two to three years [to recover],” Jose Fernando Alcantara said in a road safety forum held at Camp Crame on Wednesday.

So when his youngest daughter told them last Christmas she wanted to ride a bicycle, he and his wife immediately bought one “without a second thought.”

“[We felt it was] part of the healing process. She was learning to trust the streets again,” Alcantara said.

Ten-year-old Amiel was killed when the driver of a van, Ma. Theresa Torres, ran over the boy at the parking lot on the school grounds in Quezon City.

Speaking at the same forum, University of the Philippines (UP) professor Roland Simbulan, widower of another road crash victim, veteran journalist Lourdes “Chit” Estella-Simbulan, said road safety consciousness should be part of the Filipino culture.

‘Personal issue’

“It must be instilled in the family, schools, parishes [and] communities. Yes, accidents are accidents but most accidents could have been avoided if we checked our brakes before driving, if we followed speed limits, if we did not drink too much alcohol and if law enforcers followed the rules themselves,” he said.

Simbulan’s wife, who also taught at UP, died on May 13 last year after the cab she was riding in was sideswiped by a bus and then rammed by a second bus on Commonwealth Avenue in Quezon City.

“This issue about road safety is very, very personal to me and it should be very personal to all of us,” Simbulan said.

For Alcantara, his family’s experience was fraught with lessons about the importance of road safety in everyone’s life.

“I am an economist, and I can say we can measure a society by way of the kind of streets it has,” he said.

“Whatever happens in our streets we can say, ‘That’s our society.’ Are you happy on the road? Are you safe on the road? From the economy to the personal, our lives revolve around the kind of roads we take every day,” Alcantara added.

The forum was organized by the Department of Transportation and Communications as part of its “I Swear” campaign under the decade-long Philippine Road Safety Action Plan that started in 2011.

It was also aimed at bridging partnerships between the government and private sector in reducing accident-related deaths and making roads safer, Transportation Undersecretary Efren Moncupa said.

In his message, Philippine National Police (PNP) Director General Nicanor A. Bartolome narrated how, in his childhood, “we kids would just have to stay on the left side of the street to be safe.”

Blind spots

“Now there are blind spots when people just cross the streets. Drivers do not see the children crossing,” he said.

Bartolome reminded motorists and pedestrians to be always careful and observe traffic rules.

Data from the PNP Highway Patrol Group, Department of Public Works and Highways and Metropolitan Manila Development Authority showed that the number of people killed in road accidents rose slightly from 1,782 in 2010 to 1,833 last year.

The number of injured also went up from 28,607 in 2010 to 28,948 in 2011.

But on the whole, there was a 3.69 percent drop in the number of road crashes with 85,820 recorded in 2011 from 89,109 the year before. More than 90 percent of the total road crashes occurred in Metro Manila, the statistics revealed further.

Reckless imprudence resulting in homicide cases involving the drivers in Amiel’s and Chit’s deaths are both still pending in court.