Smokey and the bandits

Imagine a library having a rule on silence, but instead of having signs that say it, they remind you by announcing it over loudspeakers every three minutes. Ridiculous? Well as absurd as it sounds, in essence, that is exactly what is happening with our anti-smoke belching units (ASBU) sting operations.

We’ve all seen or experienced the hypocrisy first hand. They set up at the narrowest choke points in Metro Manila, like the elevated U-turns on C5 and underneath the Magallanes flyover etc, creating monumental traffic jams that rob us of billions of pesos worth of wasted fuel and man hours, which in turn creates industrial levels of unnecessary pollution just to enforce the very law they are violating.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against anti-smoke belching laws––regular readers will know how supportive I have been for cleaner air––I’m more concerned with their unsavory methods of enforcement as well as selective apprehension. I would be fine with it if it were effective and I could see (or more importantly smell) the benefits on our roads; but for the most part, they are no different to the guards at malls who create people jams at the entrances so they can inspect your bag with their magic wooden sticks. Frustratingly pointless.

And then when they do pull people over in a delivery van, AUV (they love Crosswinds and Sportivos) vans, etc; they rev the guts out of your engines, forcing it into unrealistic levels just to produce a bad result, which is hardly the way people drive their diesels. Barely a week goes by where I don’t receive a letter from irate motorists complaining about the entrapment, harassment and just plain old extortion from these randomly deputized ilong rangers. And it has got to stop.

Just last Saturday, as an experiment for this column, I stood and watched the ASBU conducting their entrapment exercise from a footbridge in Magallanes. Countless trucks and buses went by without even a flinch from these guys. Yet as soon as they saw a private diesel vehicle that looked more than 3-4 years old, they were on them like white on rice. Oddly enough, despite me watching for ten minutes and seeing about ten vehicles pulled over, not one of them was tested.

The other problem most people have is that there doesn’t seem to be a logical or uniformed standard for testing. One victim relayed his story of being pulled over the other day. His plates were confiscated for registering a reading of over 50 ptm. Being an environmentalist himself, going as far as using his own 100% biodiesel that he makes from used vegetable oil in his vehicle, he drove straight to an independent, LTO-accredited emissions testing center, where his vehicle recorded a staggeringly low emissions result of 9 ptm.

This led him to drive back to the office of the ASBU of the city where he was apprehended to get his plates back. After showing the results to them, however, they simply shrugged it off as “Don’t believe those guys, their machines are not accurate. Ours is the one we follow.”

He just wanted his plates back so he paid the fine (so much for solving the pollution problem) and took off. Before he did, though, he explained to the head of the ASBU that he makes this biodiesel and that perhaps they could help each other by handing out pamphlets or telling the people who had been caught that there is such a fuel that dramatically reduces pollution. To which the head of the ASBU reportedly said, “What? It will reduce pollution? Wag na. That would put us out of business.”

The Philippines is among the greatest polluters in the world right now. It is time we step up the fight against smoke-belchers, but these ASBUs are not the way to go about it.

The simple solution here is, aside from just strictly enforcing the annual emissions check with your registration, is to start implementing higher fuel standards, like Euro 5, which is the current standard in all environmentally responsible nations. Asides from it being extremely clean, old smoky engines will not perform with it, which kills two birds with one stone.

Also, instead of penalizing, which only creates another opportunity for corruption, try incentivizing. We already have a bill that was passed (AFVI) that allows hybrids, electric cars, LPG, CNG and other alternatively-fuelled vehicles to enjoy zero taxes, making them as affordable as their gasoline or diesel powered counterparts. It just needs congress to form a bicameral committee to ratify it, which would not only reduce pollution, but send a strong message that we are serious about our air quality.

The government needs to control the problem at the source rather than spending all its resources chasing habitual offenders. Allowing the sale of cheap, low-grade fuel is like allowing shabu in your home and then running around punishing your kids every time they do something stupid on it.

We need to have a zero-tolerance attitude if we want to make a serious dent here, and just in case anyone has missed my point, checkpoints are not the solution, they are part of the problem. The very fact that you are testing something that should have been checked during vehicle registration just reinforces the point that the credibility of your tests are so poor that even you exist solely to contradict each other. I mean, if you can’t trust yourselves to do it right the first time, how can you expect any of us to?