Over the past week, much of the nation seemed transfixed over one particular flood control project contractor and their seemingly surprising wealth. Of particular interest for many is the rather large collection of vehicles the contractor showed off during an intimate interview aired during their bid for the mayoral post of Pasig City in the last election.

It certainly didn’t escape the Senators in the recent Senate hearing that summoned the matriarch of the family. Senator Jinggoy Estrada seemed particularly interested in the number of cars, why they were purchased, and from whom.

It’s apparent that even for Senators — whom we presume must have sizeable collections of their own — 28 (or 40) cars is quite a lot. The Discaya matriarch said she has four kids, yet even that seems like flimsy reason for having that many vehicles.

We all know the real reason anyway. Cars, particularly those in the collection, are status symbols. Nothing says you’ve made it quite like pulling up in a Mercedes-AMG G63, or Cadillac Escalade, or Lincoln Navigator, or GMC Yukon Denali. Perhaps they presume they get even more points for arriving in a car like a Cadillac, Lincoln, or GMC, which are not officially sold in the country and have to be acquired from luxury vehicle importers.

Quite sadly, massive vehicle garages like this are nothing new in the country. Chances are, you might know someone with an equally large (and perhaps more tastefully-curated) collection of cars. For the affluent, acquiring this many cars is easy, and if you have just as much funds to build a massive garage to house them all, it will all stay out of the public eye for quite some time.

Perhaps what is not talked about enough is the circumstances that allow these kinds of collections to exist in the first place. It’s almost like our laws incentivize it, so long as you have the money to spend.

In Singapore, vehicle ownership is heavily regulated, with any aspiring car owner required to bid for the right to own a car from a small pool of available slots. A successful bid will result in acquiring a certificate of entitlement (COE). After that, they have to fork over the cash to pay for the car itself, often costing 200 – 300 percent more than it does in other countries because of the number of taxes and duties. Even when you finally own the car, the costs don’t stop with toll fees, congestion charges, and various regular inspections required. And in a few years, that COE will expire, requiring the owner to bid once again just for the right to keep and drive their already old car. These are all designed to discourage car ownership, free up the roads, and encourage most of the populace to take public transport.

There are no such restrictions in the Philippines, save for a few excise and luxury taxes that don’t seem to deter potential buyers. There’s already a sliding scale of taxes with the top tier of vehicle taxes already amounting to an additional 100 percent on top of a vehicle’s landed cost. However, you would never guess such a tax exists with the number of Bentley or Rolls-Royce SUV owners in the country. Some say it should be made even steeper, but if two Bugatti Veyrons amounting to ₱165 million a piece were able to enter the country without paying those taxes, we need to plug the smuggling problem as well.

What this whole scandal brings to light is the fact that cars are still quite easy to acquire. And with few checks and balances, the more affluent of citizens can acquire quite a lot of them, with little consequence (and sometimes little tax paid as well). This continues to be the main reason Unified Vehicle Volume Reduction Programs like number coding seem to have little effect. Simply buy another car to get around the plate number problem.

This strategy is apparent even in middle class neighborhoods. Chances are, you’ll see many houses with a packed garage and one or two more cars belonging to that house parked on the driveway or street. That amounts to four cars or sometimes more for a single household.

If we want to have any hope of alleviating traffic, we have to attack the problem at its root, and that is the ease of acquiring a car in the first place. Address this and related problems like street parking and traffic will be addressed as well.