While on vacation in the United States, happened to catch a couple commercials featuring products that are not available in the Philippines, or perhaps, coming soon. A commercial for Japanese automobile giant Toyota touted a new feature on their motor vehicles called the lane departure alert (LDA). Essentially, the car will warn a driver when they are weaving out of their intended lane, something, on first thought, is a great idea but thinking about the situation in Bacolod City, it would be a completely useless concept to local drivers.
According to the Toyota website:
“As the car is driving, the onboard camera detects the white or yellow lane markings and its own relative position… As the vehicle begins to leave its lane without activating the turn signal, the system generates an audible and visual alert to get the driver’s attention.”
In scenarios outside the country, a car moving between lanes without warning is not standard operating procedure. Drivers, if intending to change lanes, will typically check if there is space to move over, flick on their blinker to display their intended direction, and move into the adjacent lane. Just looking at the description, there are two things local drivers would be bewildered by, besides the concept of moving between lanes in an orderly fashion, there is also the concept of a turn signal.
Even just on the second day back in the Philippines, while maneuvering a left turn, after switching on the blinker, a truck, in an attempt to go first, cut across the intersection and tried to get in first. After narrowly avoiding an incident, he stopped and seemed to have no clue what had happened. When asked why he would cut off another vehicle like that, he said he assumed the vehicle was going straight and not making a turn. When asked what the flashing light on the side of the car meant, he had no answer. It’s either he was playing stupid because he just discovered his maneuver was a dangerous one, or he (as a representative of drivers across Bacolod City) believes the flashing lights are akin to Christmas lights – just there for decoration.
If vehicles were sold in Bacolod City equipped with LDA systems, it is pretty clear many drivers would be operating with an unending ringing in their cars. Since the car monitors when a vehicle is within a lane, what about the multitude of drivers that love to ride in between lanes – seemingly following the dotted line instead of driving in between? Would imagine the car, at some point, would grow tired of ringing and automatically shut it off, or the driver would take it back to the dealership to have it deactivated – under the assumption the safety device were a mere nuisance.
The very first column penned for this series was about how lanes on city roads go mostly unnoticed. And it still has yet to be answered what some drivers think the lines are for? There is still a theory that many drivers in Bacolod City were taught to follow the lines – it’s the only explanation why it is such a common practice.
Technology like the LDA system is a safety function. In many cases, drivers may be sleepy or in an altered state of mind and need the jolt to remind them they are behind the wheel of a vehicle that can reach high speeds and potentially create an accident. However, in an environment where it is customary for drivers to merge into a lane where there is no space available and, essentially, threaten to sideswipe other vehicles; or for drivers to assert themselves and take up space between lanes because they feel they are above waiting in a designated lane and have some bizarre compulsion to get ahead of everybody else, such innovations are useless.
Always an eye-opener witnessing how a lack of basic understanding and order can trump the millions of dollars and the time companies invest in research and development./WDJ