CITING the occurrence of over 33,000 road mishaps in Quezon City in 2016, Vice Mayor Joy Belmonte on Tuesday backed a proposed ordinance on road safety.
Belmonte, daughter of former House Speaker Feliciano Belmonte Jr., said she “fully supports” Proposed Ordinance 20CC-251 aimed at making QC “the leader of road safety in Metro Manila.”
“Between life and death, it could just be wearing a helmet, it could just be setting speed limits, it could just be preventing drunk-driving, or it could just be having pedestrian lanes that spell the difference,” she stressed.
The city council’s committee on transportation expressed concern that Quezon City has been consistently ranked No. 1 in the statistics of vehicular accidents in the National Capital Region in the past seven years.
Over-speeding is the most common cause of road deaths for pedestrians, while over 35 percent of roads deaths in Metro Manila involved motorcycles, the council said.
“There were more than 33,000 road crashes and 116 road deaths in Quezon City last year, more than in any other city in the Philippines. We think that it is high time that we do something about this,” Belmonte said.
The vice mayor said she was invited to a road safety forum that showed data of Quezon City having a high occurrence of road accidents.
“I was very disturbed about that. [But] we can control the situation,” she said. “Quezon City will be the first local government to have such ordinance, if passed.”
The 36-member city council tapped ImagineLaw, a civil society law organization of advocates for stronger road safety legislation in the local and national level, to draft the local law.
According to the vice mayor, the committee on transportation, chaired by District 1 Councilor Oliviere Belmonte, will hold a series of public consultations to gather input and get the opinions, suggestions and sentiments of different stakeholders.
“We will meet with various tricycle operators and drivers’ associations, too,” she said.
Among the provisions in the proposed ordinance are the mandatory use of child safety seats on private cars; stricter anti-drunk and drugged driving enforcement through random sobriety checkpoints; stricter speed limits on roads shared with pedestrians, children and cyclists; and use of body cameras and speed guns for traffic and police enforcers.