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SEN. Mary Grace Poe, chair of the Senate public services committee, said a change of leadership was necessary in the Toll Regulatory Board (TRB) to effect reforms in the operation of the country’s toll roads, including the implementation of the system without cash.
“There should be a change of leadership. We have seen that the executive director of the Toll Regulatory Board did not do much in the last three years, ”Poe said, when asked about the agency in an interview Friday.
He pointed to “various failures in the line of responsibility” that resulted in the chaotic implementation of the cashless system using radio frequency identification (RFID).
Poe noted that the TRB is chaired by the Secretary of the Department of Transportation (DoTr). Thus, guilt also rises to the ranks. An undersecretary for Transportation has been appointed to oversee the performance of the TRB and report periodically to the agency.
“There is that responsibility of command and, therefore, I appreciate the secretary’s frankness in admitting that he is partly to blame for it,” he added.
“They have an annual evaluation that they delivered to the dealers and apparently they didn’t deliver to the Secretary. [Arthur] You have a copy… The DoTr encompasses so many different sub-agencies, and the TRB is just one of them… But it did not send anyone proactive or, if I may say so, competent… Undersecretary [Ruben] Apparently Reinoso did not report all developments on the NLEx (North Luzon Expressway) to Secretary Tugade.
So Secretary Tugade apparently didn’t know what was going on, ”Poe said.
Despite failures in the deployment of the cashless toll system over the past three years, Poe noted that nothing was done to fix them, causing inconvenience to thousands of motorists.
“The failures didn’t just happen last month, they happened at NLEx since 2017. Mayors have been making their complaints, only to fall on deaf ears,” he said.
Poe said officials should have been quick to see the manifestations of the disorganized implementation of the new contactless transaction system and should have imposed sanctions on the wrong parties.
When asked during the interview, Poe agreed that it was hard for Tugade not to notice the traffic jam along NLEx as he was supposed to go through the highway to get to his office at Clark in Pampanga.
In recent weeks, the highways became a parking lot with queues of kilometer-long vehicles that advanced little by little to pass the booths that later required the stickers.
Poe said motorists were willing to comply with cashless transactions but found it difficult to secure RFID tags. There are also cases of unauthorized deductions in the loading of the stickers, even if they are not being used, among other problems.
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