Following the tragic vehicle crash at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport Terminal 1, where a 5-year-old girl who was there to see her father off was among the two killed, President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has ordered an investigation into the bollards or vehicle barriers that failed to serve their purpose of stopping wayward vehicles.
While there are some politics involved, as Presidential Communications Office Undersecretary and Palace press officer Claire Castro took pains to point out that the allegedly defective bollards were installed in July 2019, during the Duterte administration, the crux of the issue here are the questions that have been raised regarding traffic safety infrastructure in general in this country.
In the case of the NAIA Terminal 1 bollards, those should have been strong enough to withstand the impact of a crash and stop a vehicle from entering the area it is protecting, and they obviously failed, resulting in unfortunate and preventable deaths.
Such shoddy road safety infrastructure makes one wonder about the other similar infrastructure installed all over the country, not just in the four NAIA terminals included in the P8 million contract for the installation of bollards that is being questioned by Malacañang, as in most cases, such installations will only be tested when a crash occurs. Hopefully all the rest don’t fail as easily and result in the unnecessary loss of lives and limbs as well.
The focus on road and traffic safety has intensified, especially as the airport incident occurred just three days after a multiple vehicle collision along the Subic-Clark-Tarlac Expressway that killed 10 people and injured 37 others on May 1. As long as bad drivers and bad infrastructure are allowed on our roads, more collisions and crashes are going to occur in this country. The onus is on the government to make the entire system better.
If that effort is going to start with bollards, that will be fine, as long as it doesn’t end there. Because there is so much more to be covered as far as road and traffic safety is concerned in this country.*
