A group of road safety advocates called for local government units to set and enforce safe speed limits on city and municipal roads. Led by law group ImagineLaw, the 35 organizations represent and comprise vulnerable road users, including pedestrians, cyclists, commuters, children, older people, and persons with disabilities.
“Every hour, a person dies on Philippine roads due to road crashes. It could be any one of us—a person cycling on the way to work, a parent walking home from the market, or a courier delivering our latest online purchase,” said the group in a statement released to the public.
“We are all road users, and we all risk our lives every time we travel for as long as motor vehicles travel at high speeds on roads where people mix with traffic,” the group said.
The group—composed of civil society organizations, student councils, cycling community representative, as well as the government agency mandated to formulate policies concerning disability issues and concerns, the National Council on Disability Affairs—makes their call as the United Nations (UN) celebrates the 6th Global Road Safety Week this May 17 to 23, with the theme Streets for Life: #Love30.
The road safety advocates demanded the Philippine government “to act urgently to keep all road users safe and to #Love30 by limiting motor vehicle speeds to 30kph or less on roads where we walk, live, and play.” Their demand? Streets for life—shareable, walkable, and livable streets.
Their statement is timely for the Philippines where 12,487 people were killed in road crashes in 2018. Half of the people who die on Philippine roads are vulnerable road users, who are at the greatest risk of being struck by speeding motor vehicles.
Speeding makes roads unsafe because it increases both crash risk and crash severity. In other words, the faster a motor vehicle travels, the longer it takes to stop to avoid hitting a pedestrian or a cyclist or even another vehicle, and the more likely that a crash will result in severe injuries or death.
According to the World Health Organization, giving local authorities the power to reduce national speeds and to manage speed within their locality is important because national speed limits do not always correspond to the appropriate speed when the road environment changes.
In the Philippines, it is councilors from LGUs that know the actual road conditions best and are in the best position to classify their roads to set safe speed limits. However, the group lamented that “less than 2% of all LGUs are reported to have enacted speed limit ordinances that set safe speed limits, such as 30kph on city or municipal roads and 20kph on barangay roads and crowded streets.”
The group said that “without these interventions [speed limit ordinances and speed enforcement], the rising number of road deaths, particularly of vulnerable road users… will only continue to rise."
They reiterated their call for urgent government action and state that “[e]very hour of inaction by the government means another life lost on our roads.”
To read the group’s statement, you may visit http://www.facebook.com/imaginelawPH.
Ross is known as the Pambansang Blogger ng Pilipinas - An Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Professional by profession and a Social Media Evangelist by heart.
