Next week’s inspection of the Banilad-Talamban flyover is, pardon the pun, a knee-jerk reaction by the Cebu City Integrated Traffic Operations Management (Citom) in the wake of the accident that cost a beauty queen her lower left leg.
Miss Mandaue 2010 winner Karina Gajudo rammed her Mazda hatchback on the concrete divider at the foot of the flyover at 4 a.m.
According to her boyfriend’s account, she made a sudden U-turn and drove up the flyover after reading a text message on her cell phone.
The accident has familar elements of driver error in the equation.
Gajudo and her companion, Japanese-Filipino student Jurichi Kuribayashi, had just come from a bar and were headed home at dawn.
Drinking, driving and texting on a mobile phone can be a fatal combination.
The young man was lucky. He was able to crawl out of the wreck without any broken bones or ruptured organs, just “multiple abrasions”.
The trauma is focused on Gajudo, who was flung out of the car. She will take a longer time to heal from the physical loss and psychological strain of being disfigured by an amputated limb.
Until she gets well enough to answer questions of the police investigator, the case remains open.
It’s not clear what shape the couple were in during the drive home or what speed they were going. But even if they were both sober and wide awake, their lives changed permanently after crossing an accident-prone spot .
It wasn’t the first time a car crashed on the Ban-Tal flyover. Discounting reckless driving, the dimly lit overpass is a safey hazard at night and has long been known to have inadequate warning signs and illumination.
The scandal is not that a woman lost part of her leg in a crash there, but that the flyover has remained unfinished in terms of basic road safety since it was inaugurated and open for public use in 2008.
The hardware is up, but the software – adequate traffic signages, reflectorized boards or paint, “soft” barriers to cushion possible impact with concrete dividers remain absent or not up to par.
Whose job is it to plan these basic requirements and see to it that they are installed?
We may see the start of finger-pointing between the Dept. of Public Works and Highways, which bids out and maintains the infrastructure, and city traffic managers, whose personnel are stationed below.
It took the Feb. 23 crash, now forever linked to a missing leg, to prompt Citom to take the initiative to paint yellow stripes on the black-and-white lines of the concrete approaches just to make them more visible at night.
That’s woefully not enough.
Two years ago, after another evening car crash on the Ban-Tal flyover, the DPWH bothered to paint the gray fence black and white.
Will it take the actual death of a motorist to put up enough street lights and signages?
Citom chief Rafael Yap said ensuring road safety is a “shared responsibility” with DPWH.
A safety audit of Cebu City’s four flyovers which Citom promised to undertake is late in the making but it should be the start of actual remedies in infrastructure that carries a burgeoning volume of daily traffic.
Who knows? Maybe a flashing warning light at the approach of the Ban-Tal flyover could have helped Gajudo avoid the biggest tragedy of her young life.