I was at the Supreme Court last Tuesday doing research for my SLR paper and I happen to chat with DCA Bernardo T. Ponferrada, the head of the Philippine Mediation Center. He started talking about the case for mediation in the Philippines and the leaps that court-annexed mediation has done for the management of case dockets in the judiciary. At one point, he mentioned that what he truly wanted was there to be video-conferencing for mediation. I immediately thought: "topic for ICT blog." True enough, here I am, writing about my experience last Tuesday.
The thing is, the different agencies of our Government has been pushing for technological advancement in their respective fields. During an interview we conducted two years ago with then LTO Chief Reynaldo Berroya, I was impressed to find out that they have purchased PDAs, which are tied in to their system, such that traffic enforcers can merely type in the license plates of cars, and out goes the entire history of that vehicle, violations and all. I know that that's normal for other countries but in the Philippines? They were actually pushing that a monitor be placed in the cars such that if there's a traffic violation the Traffic Enforcers can merely scan the car for the pertinent information and need not rush after them to get the license plate.
It seems like we're catching up.
1 comment:
Your topic reminded me of the traffic enforcement systems in place in other countries. Particularly the ones that has been fully automated, removing human intervention altogether, like in Taiwan. Instead of having some human traffic enforcers hiding in street corners pouncing on unsuspecting motorists, you have sophisticated camera and sensor systems that take pictures of cars and their plate numbers in case the system detects a traffic violation, i.e. beating the red light, going against a one-way street, etc. Because it’s all fully automated, there is no discriminate apprehension of traffic violators. The pictures taken by the system are then sent to the address you provided during motor vehicle registration, together with a bill of your traffic violation penalty/fine. If you don’t pay the fines within the stated period, the penalty becomes heavier, i.e. heavier fines, suspended driver’s license, or even revoked driver’s license. Aside from the convenience of not having to go to some government office to get your confiscated driver’s license, you also eliminate the kotong culture since payments of fines are made directly to the government by depositing them in some designated banks. Not unlike the MMDA practice of issuing your TVRs (traffic violation receipt) without confiscating your driver’s license. I hope something similar to this will be implemented instead of still relying on corruptible traffic enforcers.
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