Senator Grace Poe. Photo from Senator Poe’s office
MANILA, Philippines — The veto of a bill creating a transportation safety board “should not be the end of the road to the goal of giving Filipinos [a] safe travel experience every day.”
With this in mind, Senator Grace Poe has refiled Senate Bill No. 1121 or the proposed Philippine Transportation Safety Board (PTSB) Act, which aims to establish an agency investigating transportation-related accidents and incidents.
She filed the same measure during the 18th Congress, but President Ferdinand Marcos Jr vetoed it.
READ: Bongbong Marcos vetoes transport safety board, tax-free poll workers’ honoraria bills
“The desire for safety standards in our transportation system stands tall amid fatal road tragedies along the way,” the chairperson of the Senate committee on public services said in a statement.
“As we speak, road accidents happen, taking or maiming lives. Therefore, we must act faster before the next mishap could take place,” Poe said.
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Institutional change, she stressed, “is crucial to efficiently and expeditiously address transportation accidents and prevent them.”
“Currently, our transport sector is governed by scattered hodgepodge of regulators, bureaus and agencies. Transport safety is part of their respective mandates, but it is neither their primary focus nor their core specialization,” Poe said.
“The country needs a single body with a clearly defined mission to effectively institutionalize a higher level of transportation safety. We hope we can give this to our people,” she said.
Under her bill, the PTSB is tasked to delve deeply into the facts, conditions, and circumstances involving aircraft, motor vehicles, railroad, pipeline, maritime, aerial, and other serious incidents in the transportation of people and property.
The PTSB’s findings will be submitted to the Office of the President, an attached agency, and the report will be public 60 days from the completion of its probe.
Poe likewise pointed out that the safety board will not be a mere reactive government body limited to investigating accidents.
She said it would also conduct safety inspections on land, sea, and air transport; assess existing policies, and undertake and publish studies on making transportation as safe and injury-free as possible.
“In this sense, the board performs a proactive function, looking into the causes and determinants of transport accidents and helping prevent them. After all, prevention is always better than investigation,” Poe said.
In vetoing the bill, Marcos Jr. argued that different agencies are already undertaking the functions of the proposed safety board under the Department of Transportation, Philippine National Police, and the National Bureau of Investigation.
“Creating a new body will only create functional duplication, confusion as to authority, ineffectiveness, and deficiency in the performance of the responsibilities,” he said.