Metro Manila Council Raises Penalties for Illegal Parking, Public Buses Outside of Yellow Lane

The Metro Manila Council (MMC), the governing and policy-making body of the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA)--has decided to increase the penalties for parking violators and for public utility buses that go out of the yellow lane.

The MMC approved the higher fines during its meeting on Friday, August 24--the same meeting where the body, which is comprised of the 17 mayors of Metro Manila, decided to continue with the dry run of the MMDA's Expanded High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) Traffic Scheme on Epifanio Delos Santos Avenue (EDSA).

Incidentally, the move to increase the fines for illegal parking follows after two instances where the MMDA apprehended parking violators went viral online and on social media.

The new fines are:

Unattended illegally parked vehicles: PHP2,000 from PHP500;

Attended illegally parked vehicles: PHP1,000 from PHP200; and

Buses going outside the yellow lane: PHP1,000 from PHP500.

For parking violators, the decision to increase the fine was to "instill discipline among motorists" as the MMDA continues its clearing operations of illegally parked vehicles on Metro Manila's roads.

"We really need to increase these penalties because our motorists can no longer traverse through alternate routes as these are being obstructed by illegally parked vehicles," said MMDA General Manager Jojo Garcia.

As for the decision to raise the fine for buses that violate the yellow lane policy, Quezon City Mayor Herbert Bautista said that some of his colleagues are mulling the idea of imposing an even higher PHP10,000 fine for violators on top of limiting its number of vehicles operating in a month.

"There were proposals that were raised by the mayors that the penalty be raised at PHP10,000 and that operators should have reduction of three to four buses operating in their fleets. For instance, an operator that has 100 buses would not be able to operate five buses for a month. We will be studying this matter," Bautista said.

Do you think these measures will improve the traffic on EDSA even further? We don't know about you but the PHP10,000 fine for buses that go out of the yellow lane sounds like a very good idea.