The misunderstood word for the week would probably be ‘bollard,’ especially after the tragic incident at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport Terminal 1 where two people were killed, one of them a 4-year-old girl who was just sending her dad off, after a wayward SUV plowed into the departure drop off area.
According to the internet, a bollard, by definition, is a sturdy, short, vertical post. The term originally referred to a post on a ship or quay used principally for mooring boats. In modern usage, it also refers to posts installed to control road traffic or those designed to prevent automobiles from colliding with pedestrians and structures.
There are many kinds of bollards, some are temporary, others permanent. Permanent bollards can be used for traffic control or guarding against vehicle-ramming attacks. They may be mounted near enough each other to block cars and trucks, but still allow special purpose vehicles, bicycles, and pedestrians to pass through.
The big brouhaha over the NAIA bollards issue is that it has become political, after Duterte-leaning commentators thought it would be smart to attack the Marcos admin over the failure of the bollard to stop the killer SUV. However, it was discovered that the bollards were installed during the Duterte era, so a word war started where the bollards and the deaths became collateral damage.
Now, an investigation into the bollards has been launched, based on the assumption that they were supposed to have been strong enough to stop any vehicle from seriously harming passengers and well-wishers at the airport.
The thing about bollards is that not all of them are security bollards that, if designed and installed properly, should be able to stop a fully loaded truck approaching it at speed. The bollard spectrum ranges from those mega strong ones to the temporary ones which are basically thin traffic cones. The ones installed at NAIA that were run over by the SUV were obviously somewhere in between, but they are still by definition, bollards. However, if the investigation into those bollards finds that they are not according to the required specifications, then the contractor should be in trouble and could even be found liable.
Since the incident occurred at the airport, which is a high security area by default, expectations for the sturdiness of the installed bollards are naturally quite high. However, if you come to think of it, we cannot depend on all bollards to be as effective in stopping all sorts of vehicles from hitting pedestrians in most cases, as the heavy duty, super security types of bollards would be the exception rather than the rule.
Well designed, super strong, and properly placed bollards are nice to have, but the basic issue that has to be addressed is the quality of our drivers. In the case of the NAIA incident, driver error is the primary cause and the bollard’s role is just secondary. The fact that there are drivers who got so easily spooked that he stepped on the wrong pedal and was unable to react quickly enough to rectify his mistake is the most worrying part of this incident, because where there is one, there is sure to be more of them out there.
The same goes for the multiple vehicle collision at the Subic-Clark-Tarlac Expressway that killed 10 people on May 1, where the driver was ultimately at fault. As long as we have unsafe drivers, our roads, sidewalks, and drop off and pick up areas will remain unsafe. We have to deal with the quality of the drivers first, then the quality of the road infrastructure next, and then after those two urgent concerns are dealt with, then maybe we can pick on bollards.
However, before we get to that point, we unfortunately still have a long way to go because a lot of Filipino drivers suck so much that they are dangerous, and the same could probably be said of our road safety infrastructure in general. The essentially useless pedestrian lanes and rumble strips of Bacolod City are just but one example. Another growing concern for Bacolodnons is the recently booming area near the Bata flyover, where vehicles are turning, left, right, and U, almost anywhere along the southern end of that infrastructure, making it a pretty chaotic and unsafe area all of a sudden because the authorities and the business owners don’t seem to be interested in cooperating to imposing order. If they don’t want to put some NAIA-grade bollards to restore order, a simple solution that could achieve the same result and increase safety would be to minimize crossings by requiring left turning vehicles to go a little further north and safely U-turn under the flyover, instead of doing so anywhere they please, which is the current state of affairs there.
In general, bollards are not the problem. They are also not the solution. If you come to think of it, it’s the humans that need the upgrading. The authorities should work on that aspect first.*
