today i attended a presentation on road traffic injuries.
it would have been a perfect project with perfect concepts had the consultants have better grasp as to why they are actually engaging in things that are out of the boundaries of their expertise. for one, i did not see any transport planner or traffic engineer or road safety expert in their team, and yet we, the participants were supposed to be taught on how road injuries are prevented.
(DO NOT, first of all, and again, DO NOT present a stat table straight from SPSS pasted in MS Excel, complete and unedited of all those permutation shits that only a statistic can understand. i say, DO NOT present this to a general public meeting. This does not only come from me, but from my Mr. Senor Statistics Professor. You will only look like you only want to drown them in details but don't actually know shit.)
and no, road injuries are not CAUSED by non-wearing of helmet, or by non-compliance to seatbelt law. we abide by the helmet and seatbelt law on the premise that if ever we DO MEET AN ACCIDENT, we will suffer from injuries that will render us severely handicapped, much more, dead. but non-compliance to those things do NOT, i repeat DO NOT cause injuries.
take the example of wearing shoes. we wear shoes because we want our feet protected. we do not want our feet to be accidentally pricked by thorns or cut by sharp objects but would the non-wearing of shoes cause result to a bloody cut on your feet?
i wish that the presentors had consulted first with road safety experts or at least made themselves aware of things regarding road safety because dude, road safety is a safety issue. you do not want to mislead people on matters concerning their life or death.
(i do not understand why a bio statiscian is explaining a road safety perception survey that took counts of people not wearing helmets or seatbelts and asking them why they're stupid not to wear so. a statiscian, i can understand--any statistician can do statistics, but a BIO stat? what difference does that make?)
it doesn't help that this study is trying to anchor its framework solely on the fact that people who here drink and drive--or at least that's what i am getting from one presentor. come on, lindsay lohan does that all the time. people in the city do that all the time. do not try to make this an isolated case, you presumpter! first of all, the percentage of people who do that is too small compared to people who overspeeds, to infrastructure that would fail the road safety audit or to the fact that people here resort to habal-habal for their main mode of public transport. i would like to think that given those three major issues, we could anchor a road safety/road traffic injury framework there. blackspots, as a term, was not even mentioned.
i do not know how community participation can be encouraged or solicited through IEC, advocacy and meetings. in my experience, community participation can only gained by allowing the community to feel that they own the project. "sense of ownership", anyone?
Before i could lambast the presentation in my thoughts, just before the session closed, a better presentor took over. although he did not present the project framework and the rationale for frontlining this project (when it could be better given to other agencies who are expert on these issues), he was able to assure me (not directly, of course) that at least somebody in the team knows what they are doing, stuffs on road safety, and that somebody in the team has actually worked on projects of these kinds. and he mentioned blackspots. (ahe ahe)
i am not an expert on these matters. i am not even a transport planner but dude, i've heard and read better; i do know when i'm being fooled.
(actually, never mind. never mind what i said. it's just that the invocation was that mass produced prayer-for-training song sung by josh groban and some church-sounding family name woman singer. i wish all training opening programs will just concoct their own prayer and stop using the damn song. it's not funny.)
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