Aside from signing an Executive Order (EO) to ban counterflow during traffic this week, Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña vowed to go after parking and traffic violators.
“We are going to be very strict about parking. Parking and traffic violations, and we hope the people will cooperate so we won’t need lots of traffic enforcers,” he said in yesterday’s press conference.
Osmeña said he will hire more traffic enforcers to augment the city’s existing 278 traffic enforcers.
He said he is still receiving text messages asking when the counterflow ban will take effect.
“Maybe some people are not taking this seriously, or maybe they are not aware. Let’s just give a little time for more people to be aware,” the mayor said.
Violators will lose their licenses if they persist, Osmeña warned.
“The next step after this is that the city will be confiscating your license, that will be the next step, and if you have any pending fines, you have to pay the pending fines aside from the existing violation. and we know there will going to be many that will be traumatized by this,” the mayor said.
Vehicles that are parked in non-designed areas will be clamped down.
In Barangay Busay, Osmeña said three passenger jeepneys were clamped down and their operators face fines ranging from P300,000 to P700,000 each unit.
“There are several hundreds of citation tickets. I did not give them any discount because it’s things like this that is creating traffic in Cebu. It’s not the matter of being brutal, we just don’t want them in our streets. No thank you. If they don’t want pay, then just move out of Cebu,” he said.
Osmeña said they will enforce traffic laws with or without assistance from the Land Transportation Office (LTO).
“Our lawyers started that and it’s being done in Metro Manila, we are just copying their ordinances,” he said.
The mayor also warned developers to build parking spaces in their units since it had become essential in Cebu City.
“Condominiums with no parking spaces will eventually lose clients because they don’t know where to park their cars. The value of their investment will go down,” he said.