OPINION: A Month After e-Trike Ban In Manila: Has It Made Manila’s Streets Safer?

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One month after the Philippines’ Land Transportation Workplace (LTO) started strict enforcement of its ban on gentle electrical autos alongside main Metro Manila roads, officers have been fast to border the coverage as a win for site visitors order. Fewer apprehensions are being reported. Chosen corridors look like transferring sooner. From the standpoint of conventional site visitors administration, the logic appears easy: take away slower autos from quick roads and congestion improves.

But beneath that narrative lies a extra sophisticated actuality. The ban has surfaced long-standing tensions in Philippine transport coverage, significantly the tendency to control new types of clear mobility utilizing frameworks designed nearly solely for personal vehicles, typically with out accumulating the information wanted to guage real-world outcomes.

What’s unfolding on Manila’s roads is much less a query of self-discipline than of whether or not pace is being mistaken for security, and enforcement for proof.

Velocity has been handled as security, with out proof

The LTO’s justification rests on the thought of pace mismatch. Officers argue that e-bikes and e-trikes, sometimes working at 25 to 40 kilometers per hour, create rear-end collision dangers when blended with faster-moving autos on the principle roads within the metropolis, resembling on EDSA, C-5, and Roxas Boulevard.

By this reasoning, eradicating slower autos restores predictability and reduces accidents. Early enforcement figures have been offered to help this declare.

Apprehensions reportedly dropped from greater than 100 on the primary day of implementation to fewer than fifty by the top of the primary week. For the company, the decline indicators improved compliance and self-discipline.

Transport analysis, nevertheless, means that the connection between pace and security is way extra advanced.

Worldwide research constantly present that crash severity is influenced much less by pace variance than by car mass, highway geometry, and the presence or absence of bodily separation. When lighter autos are faraway from a roadway, common speeds typically improve. Whereas this may increasingly cut back minor conflicts, it could possibly additionally increase the probability of extreme or deadly outcomes when collisions happen.

To date, the LTO has not launched comparative crash knowledge to indicate whether or not accidents have declined for the reason that ban took impact. There aren’t any publicly out there figures evaluating January 2026 with the identical interval in 2025, no breakdown of accidents involving gentle electrical autos previous to enforcement, and no evaluation of whether or not travel-time enhancements lengthen past personal motorists. Within the absence of such knowledge, enforcement statistics have successfully grow to be a stand-in for security outcomes.

Displacement, not discount

What may be inferred from circumstances on the bottom means that the ban has not diminished the demand for mobility. As a substitute, it has redirected it.

The Philippines is estimated to have greater than 1.5 million e-trikes and e-bikes nationwide, a lot of them domestically assembled and used each day for commuting, casual transport, and livelihood actions. In Metro Manila, these autos typically operate as first- and last-mile hyperlinks in areas poorly served by jeepneys or buses. When barred from main arteries with out different routes or lanes, riders don’t disappear. They transfer elsewhere.

Studies from barangay site visitors places of work and commuter suggestions point out elevated congestion on secondary and internal roads, significantly throughout peak hours. These streets are sometimes narrower, much less regulated, and extra harmful, particularly for pedestrians. From a techniques perspective, this raises a essential query. If threat is merely being shifted from highways to residential streets, can the coverage credibly be described as bettering security?

Riders and operators describe regulation with out transition

Within the absence of official research, a lot of the clearest perception into the ban’s influence has come from the folks most affected by it. Social media posts from established e-trike and e-bike teams have stuffed the knowledge hole left by the shortage of presidency knowledge.

In a single broadly shared Fb put up from a nationwide e-trike operator group, a member wrote that authorities saved saying the ban was about security, however by no means defined the place displaced riders have been anticipated to go. “We’re not racing vehicles,” the put up learn. “We’re making an attempt to get to work with out paying fares that change each week.”

On X, a Manila-based e-bike supply cooperative described the coverage as exclusion reasonably than regulation. The group famous that banning gentle electrical autos from highways with out constructing lanes or posting clear signage amounted to removing, not administration. One other put up from a metro-wide e-trike rider community centered on enforcement economics, stating {that a} single apprehension may wipe out per week’s earnings for a driver already working on skinny margins.

These accounts replicate a broader sentiment that enforcement arrived with out transition. Clear technical requirements, devoted area, and public info campaigns have been largely absent when the ban took impact.

Advocates and trade level to totally different failures

Transport advocacy teams and trade stakeholders agree that the present method is flawed, although they differ on why. AltMobility PH has criticized the coverage as emblematic of car-centric pondering, arguing that it prioritizes the comfort of a minority of motorists on the expense of the bulk who depend on public or casual transport. Of their view, equating emptier highways with safer streets ignores how most Filipinos really transfer by means of the town.

The Electrical Autos Affiliation of the Philippines (Electrical Autos Affiliation of the Philippines) has centered as a substitute on regulatory readability. EVAP has repeatedly identified that the LTO has but to obviously outline classes distinguishing pedal-assist bicycles, low-speed scooters, and heavier passenger e-trikes. With out such definitions, enforcement turns into inconsistent, leaving even compliant riders weak to apprehension.

Each views converge on a central challenge. Regulation with out clear requirements and infrastructure undermines each security and public belief.

When clear mobility is a matter of survival

The human penalties of the ban have been introduced into sharp reduction by the viral apprehension of an 88-year-old e-trike driver on Roxas Boulevard. The incident resonated broadly not as a result of it was distinctive, however as a result of it captured a well-known actuality. For a lot of Filipinos, gentle electrical autos should not experimental expertise or life-style decisions. They’re instruments for survival.

In transport-poor areas, e-trikes typically present the one inexpensive hyperlink to hospitals, markets, and colleges. Passengers affected by the ban have reported longer walks, larger prices, and fewer choices. These burdens should not mirrored in site visitors movement statistics, but they form on a regular basis life in ways in which enforcement tallies can’t seize.

As one commenter wrote beneath a broadly shared video, vehicles may lose a couple of minutes when site visitors slows, however e-trike customers lose their solely trip.

Sequencing, not shortcuts

Cities which have efficiently built-in gentle electrical autos are inclined to comply with a constant sample. They outline car lessons, redesign streets to accommodate blended speeds, handle car velocity reasonably than entry alone, and implement guidelines solely after alternate options exist. The Philippine expertise has largely reversed this sequence.

From a clear transport perspective, the issue just isn’t electrification, however governance. Mild electrical autos cut back emissions, noise, and working prices, whereas increasing entry for populations underserved by typical transit. Treating them primarily as obstacles to automotive movement dangers undermining these advantages.

Till complete crash knowledge, travel-time research throughout all modes, and displacement analyses are made public, the e-bike ban will stay tough to justify as a security measure. For now, it seems much less like a rigorously deliberate transition and extra like a well-known response: making use of twentieth-century site visitors logic to twenty-first-century mobility instruments.