Road chaos

There’s chaos on the streets from unregistered e-bikes and e-trikes and their mostly unlicensed and undisciplined drivers as they break road regulations with impunity, putting themselves, motorists, pedestrians, and other road users in danger.

A case in point is an e-trike in a viral social media video caught being driven on the South Luzon Expressway (SLEX), straddling the middle of two lanes as some cars, trucks, and buses abruptly change lanes to avoid hitting it.

Motorcycles with engine displacements smaller than 400cc are banned from expressways, like SLEX, NLEX and Cavitex precisely because anything smaller on such high-speed roadways is a disaster waiting to happen. Even without an actual collision, the so-called crosswinds that big vehicles create can send puny motorcycles crashing.

Even for smaller cars like hatchbacks, crosswinds that blow directly across the direction of travel can affect their stability and controllability. Imagine — we shudder at the thought — of such lateral winds hitting e-trikes or, worse, e-bikes at superhighway speeds.

Bicycles and Land Transportation Office-registered tricycles are not allowed on superhighways for the very reason cited above. So why do we see these e-bikes and e-trikes at SLEX and similar roads where bicycles and tricycles are prohibited from using?

Well, the conundrum has to do with the government not knowing what its right hand is doing from its left — a case of pulling and pushing at the same time, with allowing the sale of e-bikes and e-trikes without the necessary regulatory framework.

Generally, if something is not expressly prohibited by law, then it could not be penalized.

So, while the sale of such puny e-vehicles had been allowed by the government, its agencies tasked to regulate the use of motor vehicles — like the LTO and the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority, as well as local government units — are powerless against them.

MMDA chairperson Romando Artes admitted as much in a press conference last 15 February when he said that the rise of e-trikes on national roads is a growing concern as users do not have to register them or to get a license from the LTO to drive the same.

“If we arrest them and they don’t have a license, who do we issue the ticket to? In the same manner, the vehicle itself isn’t registered. So, we can’t issue a ticket to the e-bike or e-trike directly, either,” Artes told members of the media in the vernacular.

As e-bikes and e-trikes are not mandated by any law to be registered with the LTO or to get a franchise from the Land Transportation and Franchising Regulatory Board if they are used for public transportation, there is no national data on how ubiquitous they have become.

So far, Artes said that only Caloocan City has kept a tab on how many e-trikes are in use within its jurisdiction — 18,000 so far and counting.

In a separate pronouncement, LTO chief Vigor Mendoza II revealed that they are working on new guidelines to be submitted to Transportation Secretary Jaime Bautista this week. The target implementation, according to Mendoza, is before the end of February.

In a nutshell, the plan, according to Mendoza, is to ban e-trikes and e-bikes on major roads. It remains to be seen, however, if the agency would come up with a set of rules that would harmonize existing regulations on such vehicles.

One such set of regulations is LTO Administrative Order 2021-039, which categorizes electric vehicles into the following: e-mopeds, e-scooters, e-motorcycles and e-trikes, among others. Under AO 2021-039, people operating e-vehicles that have a maximum speed of 25 kilometers per hour (kph) and lower are not required to register their vehicles or obtain a license to drive. They are, however, limited to private and barangay roads.

The same e-vehicles that have a maximum speed of 26 to 50 kph, on the other hand, are allowed on local roads but must take the outermost lane like pedal-powered bicycles. They are not allowed to travel along main thoroughfares and national roads but may cross them.

Those e-trikes that are allowed to go beyond barangay roads such as local roads and tertiary national roads are required to have drivers that are licensed. All e-scooters, e-bikes, e-mopeds, e-trikes and e-motorcycles are barred from highways like SLEX.

Tricycles are, it should be pointed out, prohibited from national highways by Memorandum Circular 2023-195 of the Department of the Interior and Local Government, but this applies only to gas-powered trikes and not e-trikes.

While the LTO, MMDA, and DILG scramble to patch the regulatory holes on e-bikes and e-trikes, Congress must wake up and pass comprehensive legislation on e-vehicle trade, sale and use before tragedy strikes.