ONE FOR THE ROAD
Over the last 20 years or so that I’ve spent writing about cars, traffic and transportation, one of the most asked questions I get is: “If you were in charge or our roads, what laws would you make to improve traffic?”
My simple answer is: None. We have enough laws. Too many, actually. Yes there are some archa-ic ones that can be scrapped and some new relevant ones that could be introduced, but that won’t make the slightest bit of difference until we address the elephants in the room: Selective enforcement, lack of proper education and the culture of entitlement. There’s no point even try-ing to pretend that we can legislate our way out of this mess while these double standards exist.
The first rule about the law is it must apply to all, or none at all. Trying to rule by the “do as I say and not as I do strategy” only leads to anarchy. Take, for example, the wang wang culture. How on God’s green earth can you expect people to be respectful and abiding of road rules when they see this blatant perversion of it right in front of them? Done mostly by the lawmakers themselves, assisted by those that are tasked to enforce the very laws they’re breaking. It’s hypocrisy in its purest form.
Then you have the jeeps/tricycles/pedicabs etc., that are seen blatantly breaking the law, but somehow manage to activate another mysterious super power that always seems to render them invisible to enforcers and unaccountable to other road users. And that super power is called the tyranny of the weak.
How do the weak practice tyranny? It is actually quite simple. Basic psychiatry suggests that the basis for all psychological weakness is a refusal to take responsibility for one’s actions. For exam-ple, if I complain to my editor that I just can’t write my column because I have writer’s block, my hope is that she will find someone else to do it, or even write it herself.
By doing so, it would mean that I have shifted the responsibility of my commitment to someone else, and my excuse is that I am too “weak” to write it. Much like how, say, a kamote driver scratches his head after damaging your car because he was driving on the wrong side, drunk, without a license, and then offers to solve the problem by saying “Pasensiya na lang po. Naghahanap buhay lang po.”
The weak prey on the strong, or in this case the (perceived) rich, to take on their responsibilities, and the strong, having pity or sympathy for the weak, often do.
This only gives the weak person reinforcement that says, “Hey, this weak act really works! I’m going to do more of it.” The weak person soon has others letting him cut in front, counter-flowing down major roads, solving legal problems for them, paying their hospital bills for them when they get hurt and generally solving “problems” for which the weak cannot seem to find so-lutions.
It is manipulation of a highly developed and subversive order.
So no, I don’t think writing new laws is the answer. Or at least not the immediate answer. You cannot legislate your way out of anarchy and hypocrisy. That needs to be done by example and personal accountability.