Safe roads, not excuses

We love to blame the driver. It is the easiest way to absolve ourselves of a blood-soaked regional highway system.

For decades, whenever a breadwinner died on the asphalt in Panay, we blamed bad discipline. Or a cursed intersection. Or simple bad luck.

The newly minted Western Visayas Road Safety Action Plan (WVRSAP) finally strips away that convenient lie.

As the country’s first subnational road safety plan outside Metro Manila, it lays bare the truth. The crash data from 2015 to 2024 proves this is a systemic failure of infrastructure and governance.

Look at the geography of survival. Iloilo City recorded 3,102 crashes in 2024, resulting in exactly eight fatalities. Antique registered a mere fraction of that chaos with just 566 crashes. Yet they buried 33 people. Aklan saw 24 dead from 531 incidents.

This discrepancy is not because Iloilo City motorists possess superior driving skills. The difference comes down to rapid emergency trauma access, localized road safety audits, and traffic engineering that naturally curtails fatal speed.

Out in the provincial corridors, a momentary mistake becomes an immediate death sentence. The people paying the highest price are those working the hardest.

Motorcycles factor into 59.1 percent of our fatal crashes. But the clock is even more damning. Incidents between 6:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m. account for only a third of total accidents while generating 57.5 percent of the deaths.

Who is dying in the dark?

Working-class commuters navigate poorly lit stretches of highway. Delivery riders risk their necks to earn a PHP 500 daily wage. They travel high-speed regional arteries where basic street lighting and dedicated motorcycle lanes are treated as political favors instead of standard infrastructure.

This demands a hard look at our local executives. The WVRSAP mandates actionable interventions, specifically enforcing 30 km/h speed limits in población areas and establishing functioning provincial road safety councils.

A policy framework approved by the Regional Development Council looks fantastic in a press release. It looks great in a year-end report. But we need to know which local government units in Iloilo, Antique, and Aklan are actually passing ordinances and allocating real money to meet these targets.

Are mayors willing to sacrifice political capital to slow down traffic in their commercial centers? Or are they treating this plan as another stack of paper?

Unless a town is willing to spend PHP 2 million on better lighting and traffic calming measures, a regional framework means absolutely nothing on the ground.

We must abandon the illusion that we can educate our way out of highway fatalities.

The persistent concentrations of fatal crashes around Metro Iloilo, Kalibo, and Roxas City prove we are building roads that actively invite human error. We need to adopt a genuine Safe Systems approach where engineering anticipates mistakes.

Road safety is never about forcing humans to be flawless behind the wheel. It is about ensuring a single mistake does not demand blood as payment.