Provide service that motorists pay for

Dear DOTr Secretary Arthur Tugade,

I applaud your responsiveness in dealing with this week’s Skyway mess. Many commuters who missed their flight, who were late for appointments or whose salaries were deducted for being two to three hours late are likewise appreciative of your quick action to order the Skyway operator through the Toll Regulatory Board  to revert to the old payment system.

Perhaps, the good secretary will now have stronger arguments to compel all the operators to invest in a truly world-class toll system, just as you have succeeded in harmonizing the south and north tollways in the use of common or compatible systems.

The world-class toll system is like what one finds in Japan, Australia, Singapore and Malaysia. There are many other equally superior systems that can be described by Google.

What commuters like myself would like to see are two features:

1. Fast scanning of vehicles that will not require them to crawl or even stop before the electronic barriers.

2. Simultaneous read-out of balances.

As things stand with our toll system, we are one of the laggards in Asia.

The ideal situation is to require all vehicles to have radio frequency identification or RFID (the world-class ones). This will not only facilitate the flow of traffic, it will likewise maximize the revenues of the operators.

If the operators can upgrade the tollway payment system, more motorists will see the difference between the slow process of paying and the fast RFID. With the current RFID system, the difference is not that significant. The RFID motorist still has to slow down  or stop to get an attendant to swipe the RFID card.

In the final analysis, we all need to alleviate the traffic situation and make taxpayers and toll payers get the world-class service they are paying for.

We hope you can be the catalyst.

DIONISIO R. GIL JR.,

Ayala Alabang, Muntinlupa City