Compliance is not safety

Here is the sequence, as the city itself tells it. Sunday, July 12, before the sun was properly up, rain falling. A rider and his back rider go down near the San Rafael stoplight. Traffic enforcers pick them up, tell them not to ride on, explain that Diversion is one-way for the half marathon, tell them to keep right. He rides anyway. Then the collision.

By the time the Public Order and Safety Management Office said any of that on Monday, July 13, Councilor Jose Maria “Nene” Dela Llana had already posted. Fun runs on national highways, he wrote. He’d long been saying this. Try North Bank Road, Sunset Boulevard, the Esplanade.

He is entitled to an opinion. But a councilor is not a bystander with a phone. He sits in the body that approves the road closures Councilor Sedfrey Cabaluna’s Committee on Transportation and Public Safety endorses. When a man who votes on your permit says your event is the hazard, organizers hear it as a forecast, and they start pruning their applications long before anyone amends an ordinance. The chill lands first. The rule comes later, if it comes at all.

Which brings up the awkward part nobody in this argument wants. The organizers complied. Cabaluna confirmed it: traffic management plan with POSMO and the Traffic and Transportation Management Office, affidavit of undertaking, council-endorsed closure, the lot. Full compliance, and the crash still happened. That is not a defense of the system. It is an indictment of it. The checklist audits paper. It does not appear to ask the only question that mattered that morning, which is what happens when you squeeze a four-lane national highway to two, in rain, at an hour when Saturday night is still leaving the bars.

If the council’s review produces a thicker folder and the same road, we will have learned nothing worth the trouble.

And we are, characteristically, arguing about the wrong variable. Republic Act 10586 has been on the books since 2013. For motorcycle riders it sets no tolerance at all: any blood alcohol above 0.0% is conclusive. The law also requires chemical testing of drivers in crashes causing death or injury. Yet the World Health Organization’s 2023 country profile for the Philippines records, flatly, that testing in fatal crashes is not carried out. Meanwhile the Iloilo Provincial Health Office logged 5,195 road crashes in the province in nine months of 2025, with 167 dead and more than 2,000 hurt.

Fun runs are scheduled, permitted, marshaled and argued about. Drunk riding is none of those things. It just happens, nightly, on the same asphalt, and no one convenes a committee.

There’s also a jurisdictional question hiding under all of this that nobody has bothered to answer. Diversion Road is a national road. Under Section 21(b) of the Local Government Code, a city may temporarily close local streets for fiestas and parades. National roads require the Department of Public Works and Highways to concur. So on whose authority, and on whose liability, does Iloilo City hand a DPWH arterial to a race? Dela Llana’s alternative venues dodge the question rather than settle it. Every large event here, races and processions and Dinagyang itself, rests on the same unexamined arrangement. It survives until someone sues.

The runners, for their part, were right on the facts and are now overplaying the hand. Iloilo Running Enthusiasts, 13,000-plus strong, correctly demanded evidence before blame, then closed ranks. Fair enough. But “wait for the investigation” cuts both ways, and their own statement commits them to accountability and cooperation. This sport is permit-dependent, sponsor-funded and marketed as tourism. It cannot keep presenting itself as a wronged hobbyist club. Show up at Cabaluna’s review with a drafted safety protocol, not a grievance.

Three things would help: Put DPWH concurrence on the record for every national-road closure. Station a breath analyzer and an enforcer with impounding authority at the event perimeter, not just cones and goodwill. And require a risk annex covering weather, hours, lane geometry and the authority to stop the race, instead of one more affidavit.

The rider ignored two warnings and a lane assignment. The organizer’s paperwork was perfect, thus both things are true, but only one of them is fixable by ordinance.