Councilor says LTO ‘not ready’ for MVIS policy

By Joseph B.A. Marzan

 

A member of the Iloilo City Council called out the the Land Transportation Office (LTO) on Wednesday saying that it was “seemingly not ready” to implement its 2018 Memorandum Circular (MC) on Private Motor Vehicle Inspection Centers (PMVICs).

MC No. 2018-2158 issued in November 2018 implements the Department of Transportation’s (DOTr) Department Order No. 2018-19, authorizing the privatization of Motor Vehicle Inspection Services (MVIS) nationwide.

The PMVICs are expected to include fully automated systems which check up to more than 60 components of the car.

Vehicles which fail these inspections will not be given a digital certificate of compliance attached to their license plates via barcode, and will not be awarded registration or renewal.

They will, however, be given the opportunity to undergo reinspection.

In Western Visayas, implementation of the MC 2018-2158 in 2019 was delayed due to the urging of several transport groups citing the jeepney phaseout and the weight of the PMVIC program.

Transport groups on Tuesday already raised concerns that the implementation of the MC would “wipe out” many Public Utility Vehicles (PUVs) on the roads.

Iloilo City Councilor Romel Duron, Chairperson of the City Council’s Committee on Transportation told Aksyon Radyo-Iloilo that the LTO might not be ready to cater to the number of registered vehicles in the city alone.

The MC authorized only two PMVICs for Iloilo City and one in Passi City for Iloilo Province.

Duron said in a recent privilege speech that Iloilo City alone has 145,550 registered vehicles.

He estimated that each PMVIC may be able to inspect only up to 600 vehicles per month, based on a rate of one vehicle per 30 minutes if the center operates 10 hours daily.

Citing the number of authorized PMVICs, Duron pointed out that they will not only be servicing vehicles in Iloilo City but also those from neighboring towns in Iloilo province and the neighboring island province of Guimaras.

“If I look at this, the LTO seems to be not ready, because as of now, they only assigned two authorized PMVICs to Iloilo City. In proportion to the number of registered vehicles in Iloilo City and the province, it is not only the city which will be covered [by the PMVICs]. There are too many vehicles. We already have so many emission centers, and we still actually need more. How much more if we only have two [PMVICs] assigned to us?” he said.

 

‘HUMAN ERROR’

Duron also pointed out that the real safety problem in the transportation sector is not the quality of the vehicles, but the behavior of drivers.

 

“This is a good program, but they have to have more [PMVICs] if they don’t want to inconvenience the public. The real problem in our transportation system is reckless driving and not the differences in vehicles. Even if they have an old car, if the driver is careful and maintains the car well, it would still be good,” he remarked.

He compared the PMVIC program to the DOTr’s signature Transport Modernization Program, which he said that while both sounded like good prospects, they were not well-thought out and actually cost heavily.

He fears that if the LTO pushes with the implementation of the PMVICs, people will be seeing many unregistered vehicles on the roads.

“It really seems untimely, seeing that we are still in a pandemic, and people are still scraping for where they would get payment for the already-expensive vehicle registration. If they will push for this, we might end up with many unregistered vehicles in the city,” Duron expressed.

Duron struck the same tone as the transport groups, hoping that the LTO and DOTr would delay the PMVIC program.