LTFRB recipe

So traffic is still a mess, public transport hasn’t improved, and the roads (aside from those in private hands) are on their way to indisputably atrocious. If you ask me, the only attractive sight in front of the average, middle-class Filipino commuter was the sprouting of Grab and Uber.

These ride sharing services have supplied a huge gap in the delivery of transportation services and eased the pain of commuting in the millions (of rides). And now, despite the rapturous reception they have received from the complaining public, the government authorities (and I dare name them: the LTFRB, a.k.a. the Land Transportation and Franchising Regulatory Board) want to clamp down on them?

Oh, come on. How does the government expect its citizens to feel the slightest bit patriotic when it seems to be doing its darnedest best to make life, with each passing day, even more miserable? Is it the official analysis that we Filipinos are a masochistic, misery-loving lot, that we actually deserve to be stomped down to the ground bit by slow, painful bit?

The LTFRB isn’t named the Let’s Teach Filipinos Rotten Behavior or the Love To Fry Rural Brains department. Its role is to watch out for us and let us benefit from their supposed expertise in the transportation field, and their assumed concern for our well-being. So we ask: is it performing this role by targeting these ride sharers, and mulishly refusing to accredit them after more than a year of review and dialogue and inspection, and now prohibiting them from operating the more than 50,000 cars?

Imagine that. So many passenger vehicles, comfortable, beautifully appointed, with mostly polite drivers, on the road and serving the Filipino public. We want them disabled, so we can go back to the discomforts and inconvenience of smelly, rickety (and probably harboring the next viral plague) chariots of death?

And consider the car owners, those would-be entrepreneurs that have been able to find an alternative means of livelihood, or a way to supplement the family income. Does the LTFRB actually want them to lose that opportunity and dislocate them from the informal economy?

Hey, LTFRB. We, the riding public, give you failing marks. Instead of phasing out old cabs and buses, you’ve allowed them to proliferate and operate. So maybe it should be you that should be phased out. Instead of running after cheaters and repeat offenders, you’ve let them exist, merrily ripping off innocent passengers. So maybe we should let the encantadas and tikbalangs rip out your black hearts and feast on them (assuming they’re even edible)!

And you even have the gall to tell us Filipinos that it’s the fault of Uber and Grab that they haven’t registered, when it was you, dear LTFRB, that suspended the registration of these providers for more than a year! What if we don’t pay you your per diems and salaries and allowances for more than a year? (That might be an even more painful punishment than the heart ripping alternative).

No, it’s the LTFRB that is the aswang and the asungot here. They are the Leeches That Feed Ravenously on Babes like us. They have exercised Little Thought For Rider Benefit. They should be Left To Fester and Rot, B____tards!

Whose side are you really on? Are you protecting the crummy and inefficient franchise holders? Mollycoddling the lousy service providers? Pursuing the agenda of shady interests? Well, if you are, you should stop it. Your mission is to serve us. Not them. Otherwise, you can just Leave. Tender. Flee. Resign. Bye!

(Otherwise, you get more bad attempts at writing like this)