The Philippines Department of Transport Figures
support the figures from overseas
(but they don't know it!)

While surveys carried out in The USA, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, etc all showed motorcycles have less accidents than any other vehicles on the road and that freeways were safer than rural roads (in some cases as much as 148 times safer) the Philippines Department of Transport has insisted that motorcycles are banned from expressways for reasons of safety. A recent look at the figures from the Philippines Department of Transport shows that their own figures support the findings from overseas!

Based on 1999 statistics from the Department of Transportation and Communication-Land Transportation Office, motorcycles, grouped in with tricycles, account for 32% of all registered vehicles in the country.

The Traffic Management Group's 1999 summary of vehicle accident statistics reveals that despite being 32% of all registered vehicles in the nation, motorcycles and tricycles account for only 2.9% of all the accidents that occured in the nation last year, with motocycles alone (without tricycles) accounting for only 0.9% of accidents!

The same statistics also show, that the very vehicles that RA2000 lists as being allowed to be banned, buses and trucks are in fact by far the deadliest. Buses, at 0.9% of all vehicles in this country accounted for 21% of all the accidents, while trucks, at 7% of all the vehicles accounted for 16%.

Futhermore, the statistics also revealed that the expressways are in fact the safest environment for any vehicle to operate, accounting for only 32% of the accidents nationwide while the rest, 68%, occured on all other types of roads, including National Roads (our most likely alternative to the expressways) which are the deadliest with a 36% contribution to total accident statistics for the year 1999.

This is completely contrary to the 24 November 1999 DOTC claim that "it cannot be disproved that motorcycles contribute largely to traffic accidents on main thoroughfares" and proves, along with the TRB's request to us for worldwide and local traffic motorcycle accident statistics, that the ban is totally baseless in fact.

Click here for the results of the overseas surveys