Trip cutting

A reader emailed in a rather lengthy complaint against the practice of trip-cutting by jeepney drivers and the inability of government land transportation authorities and regulators to actually lift a finger to follow on repeated promises to deal with the problem.

It is easy to sympathize with the letter-writer because trip-cutting is not only a violation of a jeepney's franchise but, more importantly, it exacerbates the shortage in mass transport units and results in a lot of inconvenience to the riding public and a lot of missed opportunities.

But what exactly is trip-cutting? It is when a jeepney driver, whose jeepney has a franchise to serve, say a Minglanilla to Cebu City and vice-versa route purposely fails or refuses to complete a run on this route and turns around, usually because a better opportunity to pick up more passengers has arisen in the other direction, or that fuel consumption is saved as a result.

When a driver does that, the route required to be plied under the franchise given to his jeepney is cut and not complied with and commuters waiting at all the points of the unserved and abandoned route are deprived of the service that the franchise for public conveyance was issued for and supposed to address.

The problem with trip-cutting, however, is that the authorities never know when they precisely occur. And it is virtually impossible to post enforcers every inch of the way to prevent drivers from refusing to complete their routes, especially when their jeepneys are already empty, and to apprehend those who insist on doing so.

There are perhaps only two ways to address the problem of trip-cutting by jeepney drivers. One is simple, the other more complicated and infinitely more expensive, and hence unpopular. Let us start with the simple. It requires no more than for the complainant to file a formal complaint with the authorities, armed with the precise facts pertaining to the violation.

You see, the problem is something that just cannot be left to the authorities alone to solve. It, more than anything else, also requires the active participation of the complainant. It is for the complainant to initiate the process and for the authorities to take it up from there and finish the process. If this is not done, then not all the noise we make will ever solve the problem.

That is unless we try the more complicated and expensive solution, which is to install equipment like a GPS on all jeepneys so that their movement can be monitored and recorded all the time. But there is a reason why I said it is complicated and very expensive, and I do not have to explain why. So there. Either we do or we don't.