DAGUPAN CITY , Philippines — The Private Motor Vehicle Inspection Center is still on dry run, a regional director of the Land Transportation Office (LTO), said while admitting that there are not enough accredited PMVICs to cater to the big number of vehicles that go through the new inspection system.
Teofilo Guadiz III, LTO director for Region 1, told Pangasinan media that he has been receiving complaints of long queues of vehicles at an accredited PMVIC here and that health protocols amid the COVID pandemic, like social distancing, are no longer observed.
“It’s also a very big problem. We do not have enough number of PMVICs,” he said.
In Pangasinan, he admitted that there are only nine approved PMVICs, which means only one for every congressional district and three others that would cater to trucks and buses later.
“We see the lack of PMVICs, so the lines are long,” Guadiz said, adding that they’re trying to address the problem by ordering the PMVIC in Dagupan to operate seven days a week for 12 hours daily.
Given the situation, he hopes that the other PMVICs in Pangasinan would soon operate.
The other alternative, according to him, is to go back to the old system using private emission testing centers, although this still needs approval of the Department of Transportation (DOTr).
Guadiz stressed that the PMVIC is an implementation of the Land Transportation Code and Clean Air Act, which allow only roadworthy vehicles to minimize air pollution and road accidents.
He said the number of road accidents is increasing every year. There were only 63,070 accidents recorded in 2007, while in 2019, at least 116,906 were recorded.
“If we will not do this, road accidents and deaths will continue to rise,” he pointed out, noting that the 12,487 deaths in 2018 alone outnumber the deaths caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.?“What’s at stake here is the life of the people.”