Highroad Hassle

This morning, I almost came in late for work because of unexpected traffic caused by a car that hit a jeepney while trying to change lanes on one of the cloverleaf curves of the Nicols interchange. Issue number one: who the hell in his right mind drives a vehicle into an already rather awkward portion of road and thinks "This just might be the best time to play lane switcheroo!" huh? The bonifacio-bound loop from the southbound lane, in case you're not familiar, is almost always congested with traffic. It could be the dead of the night during christmas eve after the rapture, and you'd still see a shitload of cars there as though there's some sort of car magnet buried underneath the place by Toyota engineers duing the Second World War.



So anyway yeah, tge car hit the jeep. As dictated by the tradition first laid out during the stone age when Grok, if two vehicles hit each other they are required to stay in their original positions for a fixed period of time which is roughly equivalent to the length of a presidential administration. On good days, you can still see people dressed in spanish-era clothing still standing around two calesas that hit each other 200 years ago, waiting for the guardia civil to fix things.

It doesn't matter if the two vehicles occupy about 90% of the passable lanes, and that the only way for other cars to pass through is either tiptoe on the sidewalk or develop the same jumping feature that you can find in Speed Racer's car. No, the cars have to stay there.
According to people, it's so the police can confirm the position of the vehicles for later filing in insurance, or for even rarer cases, for taking to the courts. For me though, it's just so the inconvenienced owners of the vehicle can spread the joy of being late for work/school/street dance battles to other drivers who they probably assume are more than happy to empathize. And by empathize, I mean commit road rage-fueled acts of brutality.

Actually, I understand why the cars have to be not moved. If the vehicles move and somebody starts bluffing as to who hit who, and it's not really obvious without the original setup of vehicles, deciding who's calling in bitch can be decidedly hard. But come on. If we can apply technology to ridiculously simple things like telling our friends what we ate for lunch, why can't we use its benefits here, where it can actually help? Every other cellphone nowadays has a camera with a resolution good enough to shoot HD sex scandals. Why can't we apply that here? Take a picture of the damn accident scene. If it's too falsifiable for you, take a video. Then move the goddamn vehicles. If ever it's a more reliable way of doing things, since it doesn't leverage on whether or not the cop who responds to the scene is high/drunk/catatonic. Taking a pic or a vid can be done in a matter of seconds, as opposed to the police who will undoubtedly take a while to arrive due the same traffic the vehicles are causing. You can show and show it again and nobody's the wiser.

Taking that idea further, I'd like to think that in the near future, our cars will have blackboxes that record the last 24 hours of a car's activities including a 360 peripheral view of the car that will allow you to recall what happened to the car accurately. This way, we don't have to rely with the time tested procedure of See-who-shouts-louder-and-claim-affiliation-to-a-more-powerful-individual mode of contesting liablity.

Technology is progressing, really. But I get a feeling it doesn't get applied enough where it should count.

On a completely unrelated note: Sidecars, motorized sidecars should be outlawed on national roads. They are both dangerous, and representative of everything wrong with Filipino culture.