New vehicles sales figures

SO Philippine vehicle sales are up this year by 27 percent (to over 168,000)—apparently led by Hyundai, Mitsubishi and Toyota. Well that is good news for the car workers of Korea and Japan, for the toll fee collectors, for the oil companies, for the banks who readily lend money for vehicles but not for new business with their astronomical loan interest rates, and for the LTO in emission test fees and annual taxation.

For the people of the Philippines it means yet even worse congestion on the roads, more pollution and things going just that much slower. It may, I guess, indicate better deliveries of stuff to consumer outlets so it’s easier to spend the remittance money. Overall, I see it as not very good news for the Philippines.
Too many vehicles now for the condition of the roads.

The Philippines has about 31 motor vehicles per thousand people, compared with Malaysia at 273 and tiny Singapore at 158 per thousand and Indonesia at only 21 per thousand. These statistics are however misleading as the distribution of cars in the Philippines is such that there are people who own 7 or 8 with the consequence that even less people than appear from the 31 per thousand don’t have any vehicles at all (adding to the chaotic public transport infrastructure).

Looked at another way, there are about 14 vehicles per km of road in the Philippines compared with 183 in Singapore and 246 in Hong Kong. It is beyond my imagination how the traffic would be in the Philippines (and in Metro Manila in particular) with 246 vehicles per km of road! No doubt the situation would be addressed by installing yet more timed traffic lights and more security guards directing the traffic!

It seems that Filipinos don’t really like to walk very far unless it is around shopping malls. The ubiquitous jeepneys stop anywhere people hail them (or want to get off), regardless of the surrounding traffic implications. There are lots of door-to-door tricycles around, an enormous number of those small delivery vans and of course those extremely dangerous buses.

There is much talk in the need for infrastructural development in the Philippines, building more roads, well yes, roads are certainly needed but it may be worth considering introducing some proper traffic management into the roads that we already have—the way the traffic lights operate for instance, jeepney stops and doing something about the forced pay parking around the malls. I noticed that at Alabang Town Centre at Christmas there was still a need to pay for parking. Would have seemed the right thing to do was to allow people to park around there without the rigid parking controls for the heavy shopping days thereby allowing more shoppers into the mall to the benefit of the tenants—a demonstration of a bit of Christmas spirit! But then this is the Philippines where money is the only thing that matters.

If people have to add to the chaos on the roads by buying more vehicles, then perhaps there should be a scheme such as there is in Japan where vehicles over a certain age can no longer be registered. Remove some of the awful junk off the roads to make way for newer vehicles and ensure that the vehicles actually on the road are safe as so many of them appear not to be. And then there is the question of driving competence etc. etc. New vehicle sales just add more to what is already a big mess so let’s not be too quick to hail.

This as an indicator of enhanced economic progress! –MIKE WOOTTON, Manila Times

Mike can be contacted at mawootton @gmail.com