BANNING e-bikes and e-trikes from national highways is, from a regulatory standpoint, the easiest decision government can make. It is decisive and defensible — especially when framed around safety. But in Western Visayas, where a growing number of commuters quietly depend on these light electric vehicles to get to work, school, markets, and clinics, the harder question is: What comes after the ban?
The Land Transportation Office (LTO) is correct in flagging the real dangers of e-bikes and e-trikes sharing high-speed national roads with buses, trucks, and private vehicles. These highways were never designed for slow, lightly built vehicles. On that point, the policy logic is sound.
But policy does not exist in a vacuum. In Western Visayas, especially outside city centers, public transport options are thin, unreliable, or simply nonexistent. Jeepney routes are limited. Modern PUVs are still unevenly deployed. Tricycles are barred from highways. And in many towns, service roads are either incomplete or absent altogether. For many workers, an e-bike is not a lifestyle choice — it is the only affordable, practical option left.
This is where the policy begins to wobble.
Telling riders to “shift to safer, designated routes” sounds reasonable — until one asks where those routes are. In many parts of Iloilo, Aklan, Antique, Capiz, and Negros Occidental, national highways are the main roads. There are no parallel service roads. There are no bike lanes. There are no feeder routes. The alternative, in practice, is often a long detour that adds time, cost, and risk — or no route at all.
An information drive, no matter how extensive, cannot substitute for infrastructure. Education cannot replace transport planning. Awareness campaigns do not magically produce safe roads.
The annoying truth is this: government is moving faster on prohibition than on preparation.
If the ban is enforced without realistic alternatives, it risks becoming another policy that disproportionately burdens the working poor — delivery riders, workers, vendors, and minimum-wage earners who turned to e-bikes precisely because fuel costs soared and transport options shrank. Safety must never be pitted against survival, yet that is exactly the dilemma being created.
Western Visayas does not need to abandon the ban. It needs to complete it. That means accelerating the construction of service roads, not just announcing guidelines. It means clearly establishing, identifying and marking LEV-safe routes, not leaving riders to guess. It means coordinating with local governments to redesign mobility at the barangay and municipal levels, not merely reviewing ordinances. And it means expanding affordable public transport before removing the last-mile options people already use.
Banning is easy. Building alternatives is hard. But only one of these choices leads to safer roads and fairer mobility.
If government truly wants a safer transport system, it must prove that when it takes something away, it is ready to replace it — not with words, but with roads, routes, and real options.
