After the Supreme Court put in limbo the no-contact apprehension scheme utilizing closed-circuit TV cameras, now comes the unified ticketing system that the Land Transportation Office, the Metro Manila Development Authority, and the 16 cities and one municipality in the capital region are adopting.
As the newfangled scheme intends to align the differing and oftentimes conflicting road regulations being enforced by various local government units in the metro, the single-ticketing system may yet do the public some good. Good riddance to the “each its own” and “republic of this and that” attitude that some LGUs have been saddling people with.
Certainly, the ease of paying traffic fines under the new system is its selling point as all violations shall be recorded by the LTO, and the fines derived from them are farmed out either to the MMDA or the LGUs whose enforcers did the traffic apprehensions.
The database of traffic violators can, of course, be used to determine the fitness of drivers to continue operating vehicles. Recidivists can easily be tracked and suspended or banned altogether from being behind the wheel of a car or the handlebars of a motorcycle.
In terms of revenue generation, the unified ticketing system is just another way of collecting money from the public in this age of digitalization when people have fully embraced online shopping and e-payments. It is supposed to make the payment of traffic fines hassle-free.
But why not hassle the deserving with long lines paying hefty fines? Let undisciplined motorists suffer. Let them take long seminars and strip them of their licenses, again, if so warranted by their actions.
Let the queues and retraining be some sort of aversion therapy so they’d think twice before wantonly violating road regulations that had been put in place to ultimately save lives.
Road discipline, however, is a two-way street, the other part of the equation being the proliferation of road vultures who masquerade as traffic enforcers, but whose main source of livelihood is to mulct money from motorists or to derive commissions from questionable traffic tickets.
They are the power trippers in uniform who deviously create “motorist traps” so that in the chaos they themselves have created, they could indiscriminately issue traffic violation tickets or, in the case of the hopelessly corrupt among them, ask for “coffee money.”
Take, for example, that motorist trap on the corner of the three-lane Pedro Gil Street and Taft Avenue in Mayor Honey Lacuna’s “Bagong Maynila.”
The traffic enforcers there would allow jeepneys to take their sweet time picking up passengers in the University of Philippines-Manila corner of P. Gil and Taft, so they can pick off motorists who ease into the center lane a little to make their left turns.
The motorists in the center lane turning left may have committed a violation, and so issue them tickets. But who set them up in the first place? Who created the situation? Who created that motorist trap by allowing jeepneys to use the UP-Manila corner as their terminal?
How about those same traffic enforcers allowing people to violate the no-crossing sign at that same UPM corner and when a left-turning motorist eases again into the center to avoid hitting them, he or she is then flagged down for a ticket?
Cause and effect. If the enforcers had been doing their job of clearing out that de facto jeepney terminal and not allowing people to charge through that no-crossing UP Manila corner, then what motorist would not want to turn left using the left lane?
But then what interest would those enforcers have in doing their job of clearing the terminal and enforcing the no-crossing sign at the UP-Manila corner? That’s their motorist trap, after all. If that’s not their bread and butter, why would they blink when asked to just issue the traffic violation ticket, but with the motorist signing it under protest for adjudication?
Why would they ask a motorist to just apologize over an “infraction” that the latter precisely wanted to be adjudicated out of the belief that it was dubious to start with?