House panel bats for electronic vehicle ID to ease traffic

By Paolo Romero (The Philippine Star) Updated November 30, 2010

MANILA, Philippines – The House committee on Metro Manila development strongly pushed yesterday for using electronic vehicle identification technology to reduce the traffic problem in the metropolis and weed out illegal public utility vehicles (PUVs).

Navotas Rep. Toby Tiangco, chairman of the committee, held a public hearing shortly after the Metro-wide bus strike and the flood-induced traffic jam that paralyzed vehicles for hours last week.

The hearing was attended by officials from the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA), the Land Transportation Office (LTO), the Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board (LTFRB), and the Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) as well as representatives of transport groups.

“We need to use existing technology that has been proven to work in more developed countries like Singapore, Malaysia the United States and Europe,” he said. “We can no longer simply rely on human enforcement of our traffic and transport rules and regulations. If the technology is already there, we should use it as soon as possible.”

The committee tasked San Juan Rep. Joseph Victor Ejercito to chair the technical working group and come up with steps to implement an electronic tracking or PUV management system.

Ejercito said as former mayor of San Juan, he has a full grasp of the problem of oversupply of buses and other PUVs. Metro Manila’s main thoroughfare, EDSA, can only hold 1,600 buses and yet there are 3,600 buses plying the highway daily not counting the “colorum” (unregistered or out-of-line) units.

“The first order of the day should be to remove colorum buses and other PUVs on EDSA. Initially I propose that we use radio frequency identification (RFID) or similar technologies used in other countries like Singapore for PUVs. I strongly believe that this is the only way to weed out the colorums and illegal PUVs on EDSA,” Ejercito said.

The electronic tracking system will likewise be able to monitor bus movements, and therefore, congestions can be prevented. It can also act as an electronic dispatching system that can monitor passenger volume and match the supply of buses with the number of passengers at a particular time during the day. This will certainly address the huge traffic problem in the metropolis, he said.

Tiangco said the technical working group will study and review the system used in Singapore to determine if this is applicable in our present set up or is acceptable in Metro Manila.

It can be recalled that the Supreme Court has temporarily prohibited the LTO from collecting RFID fees due to a petition by some party-list groups.