International Road Safety Experts Train Traffic Enforcers on Speed Enforcement

"Let's not wait for more tragic crashes to happen. As law enforcers, it is our duty to focus on preventive and proactive actions to save lives on the road," said Land Transportation Office (LTO) Assistant Secretary Edgar Galvante as the speed enforcement training of trainers opened Monday, October 7, at Seda Vertis North, Quezon City.

To complement the nationwide implementation of Joint Memorandum Circular (JMC) 2018-001, which provides local government units (LGUs) with standards and guidelines on speed limit setting, road classification, and road crash data collection, ImagineLaw invited experts from Global Road Safety Partnership (GRSP) to train our local law enforcers on speed enforcement.

The training covered good practices on speed enforcement based on experiences of GRSP experts Robert Susanj and Mark Stables in their decades as Chief of Slovenian Traffic Police and Police Calibration Services Manager of New Zealand's Ministry of Transport, respectively.

Funded by the United Nations Road Safety Trust Fund, this training fulfills the DOTr's and LTO's responsibility to provide capacity building on speed limit enforcement, under JMC 2018-001.

"Enforcement is essential to make speed limits effective. Where countries have changed their speed limits but have taken little action to enforce them, there have been very limited benefits," said Susanj, a former Director of Slovenian Traffic Police, founding member of TISPOL: European Traffic Police Network, and now a consultant for GRSP.

Aside from lectures, the participants headed to the North Luzon Expressway (NLEX) on Tuesday, October 8, for practical speed enforcement exercises.

"There is no single solution to the problem of excess and inappropriate speeds. A package of countermeasures is necessary and police enforcement is one of these," according to Stables, a former national advisor in charge of road crash investigation in New Zealand, founder of a private traffic safety consultancy, and also a consultant of GRSP.

"We want to make sure that all LGUs in the country will be able to set and enforce speed limits. This is why we are helping DOTr and LTO organize this training of trainers. We trust that by building the capacity of the LTO’s law enforcers, we are creating a multiplier effect that will eventually lead to nationwide enforcement of speed limits," said Sophia Monica San Luis, Executive Director of ImagineLaw, a public interest law organization advocating for road safety.

Enforcers from LTO, NLEX, Philippine National Police-Highway Patrol Group (PNP-HPG), Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA), Pasig City, and Quezon City Traffic Management Offices attended the training and were expected to deliver effective speed enforcement trainings within their respective localities.