EDITORIAL - Another law doomed to fail

There is so much furor generated by the new law against drunken driving that everybody seems to have forgotten one very important thing  enforcement. If there is one thing seriously wrong with this country, it is law enforcement.

Forget about the thousands of laws that deal with all sorts of human activities and just focus on those that deal with driving motor vehicles. Pray tell what law — just one law — that is being enforced with a fair degree of regularity.

The truth of the matter is that, instead of complaining, a lot of people are actually asking — nay, begging — for law enforcers to implement laws pertaining to the driving of motor vehicles but to no avail.

For instance, right here in Cebu, it is fairly safe to assume that there are far more jeepney drivers who drive without turning on their headlights at night than there are drivers who drive drunk.

Yet law enforcers have done absolutely nothing about this type of menace. If authorities claim otherwise then why is it that jeepney drivers continue to be undeterred and keep on driving at night without using their headlights.

Jeepney drivers claim that turning off their headlights allows would-be passengers to see more clearly the destination signboards on their windshields. What the drivers do not see is that the tradeoff for passenger convenience is danger to life and limb.

While there is no statistics to compare drunken driving with switched off headlights, the fact that both pose serious physical dangers to every road user makes any comparison useless and uncalled for.

The law against drunken driving is either good or bad, depending on which side of the issue you may be. But let not anyone's concern over the new law obscure the fact that even if no such law came to pass, streets would still be safer if all other laws are enforced diligently.

And that brings us back to the real problem, which is enforcement. The drunken driving law is in the news only because of its newness, its novelty. But give or take a few weeks and a few token arrests to give the law some semblance of life, and it will just die a natural death.