Public transport

I grew up riding public transportation. My father didn’t believe in private cars. This professor of medicine took a bus from our home in Paco to Quiapo and transferred to a jeepney going to Dapitan for his laboratory and classes at the UST College of Medicine.

Looking back, riding public transportation in the ’60s was no big deal. I could take the bus to Quiapo at 6:15 a.m., transfer to a JD bus for UP Diliman and be in my 7:30 a.m. class with time to spare. Metro Manila was not crowded then and had just the right population size for comfortable living.

Things grew progressively worse when my kids were growing up. I didn’t dare let them take public transport. Traffic was getting bad. Buses and jeepneys were increasingly unsafe. Public transportation was totally neglected by government.

In recent years, it has been carmageddon. People had to wake up before dawn to get to their offices in the CBDs by 8 a.m.

Transport secretaries found it difficult to do anything to improve the situation. Some blamed the bureaucracy and its rules. Others just gave up trying to live with the politics of public transport. The only major project, the MRT, was a truly bad deal.

We kept on sending experts abroad to study public transport management, but no one in government asked them to help. Studies after studies end up just filed in a dusty cabinet.

You don’t have to be a PhD in transport management to know why our system sucks. It is free enterprise at its worst. Multiple bus and jeepney owners charging drivers rental for plying a route. Every driver for himself and never mind the chaos each one creates. Everyone dreams of having a car, making the situation worse.

Transport Secretary Art Tugade knew the problem before he took his oath. I know because we met with him and discussed it.

Emergency powers to deal with the problem was something Ed Yap of Makati Rotary, Ping de Jesus, and I suggested to enable him to fix the dysfunctional franchise system. We suggested making an example of EDSA, but it took four years for Tugade to have the guts to finally do something.

And that’s only because COVID and the lockdown created a good opening for Tugade. It would have been foolish for him to let such an opportunity pass.

It also took the patient prodding of Ed Yap to finally get the EDSA BRT experiment tried. What we have is actually a virtual BRT because we are making do with what we have. It is not a BRT designed from scratch with the help of high cost consultants. Interestingly, one of Tugade’s former usecs told me two years ago that bus operators were ready to cooperate to do something like this because they were losing money in the traffic madness.

First thing that had to be done was to change the bus lanes. The old system didn’t work. Cars moved to the bus lanes to turn right. Since the lanes had no physical barriers, the buses overtook each other outside the bus lanes.

Move the lanes to the left. There is a temporary problem of bus doors being on the right. Barriers were installed to get the passengers to go straight to the center island and use the MRT pedestrian overpasses to get to the sidewalks on the left or ride sides of EDSA.

Using COVID to restrict public transport, two sets of buses were allowed by DOTr to move passengers on the BRT bus lane. The buses hired for MRT augmentation started from MRT3 station in EDSA North Avenue to Ayala and Taft LRT station. From start to Makati, the trip was all of 27 minutes non-stop. The fare for now is subsidized. MRT personnel collect P25 for the buses under the MRT augmentation project.

Eventually, the “carousel” routes were allowed at P11 base fare:  Route “A” from Monumento to MOA; Route “B” from Monumento to MOA via Roosevelt; Route “C” from Roosevelt to MOA; Route “D” From Quezon Avenue to Ayala; Route “E” from Cubao to MOA.

The agreed rental for the buses is P70 per kilometer run for the MRT augmentation project. Government pays whether the bus is loaded or not. This is needed to provide a predictable and efficient service that will entice car owners to leave their cars at home. The more riders, the less government pays.

The experiment is in its early days, and it is best for everyone to withhold judgment. We ought to be glad that the experiment is happening at all. So far, ridership is rising and they are getting good feedback from passengers. Some people are choosing the buses instead of the MRT.

Many transport experts doubt the viability of the experiment. But I think if DOTr persists and constantly improves the system, it will at least be better than what we had on EDSA pre-COVID.

I suggested that the buses be allowed to run counterflow so the doors will open at the center island and not have a passenger taking his life into his hands and run across EDSA. Buses running counterflow will also discourage VIP convoys from using the bus lanes to escape the traffic mess ordinary mortals suffer.

As for the subsidy, it is not unusual for governments to subsidize public transport. MRT is being subsidized too. Reduced seating capacity to allow for social distancing, unstable demand with continuing COVID fears and increase in costs due to new rules must all be considered in compensating bus owners.

On the whole, public funds are well spent in this subsidy. People get to their destinations faster, private cars on the road are reduced, buses are now safer because drivers do not have to race for passengers. Furthermore, drivers only have to work set number of hours and no longer have to take drugs to keep themselves awake.

But the virtual BRT on EDSA must be supported by other bus and jeepney routes that feed into it. Eventually, there should be similar systems that go east to west to serve those living in Antipolo and further in Rizal.

At last we are moving. This virtual BRT could be the only transport legacy project of Duterte in Metro Manila that was not started by a previous administration. Tugade must make it work.

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco.