Transport modernization

Last week I said: “Cebu’s skyline rose rapidly but our public transportation has remained the same in the last 50 years.” Many, especially those who are, or were, involved in the government programs over the decades would readily take exception to that statement, citing improvements in the transport sector introduced in the past, and there would be some truth to that. But the thrust of my statement deals with the core of transportation’s role in the life of society, and that is to move people every day to earn a living.

Maybe it’s how we understand what modernization means. What do we mean by “modern” and what aspects do we expect when we hear the word “modern”? If we’re talking about a cellphone, we can imagine it’s improvements over the years, from the clunky one-kilogram Motorola device in early 1970’s, the Siemens suitcase-like device in the mid-80’s to the familiar keypad cellphone in the 1990’s up to the touchscreen phone of today.

Or maybe we think about capacity --the kilobytes of memory of old computers, improved to megabytes measurements decades later up to GBs and TBs of today. In most anything we use, we can readily trace the improvements from the outdated standards of yesteryears to the modern, futuristic looks, functions, and performance of today.

How about our transport system? What does “transport modernization” really mean? In the Transport Research Board website, it says, “The Public Utility Vehicle Modernization (PUVM) Program of the Philippines aims to transform the road sector of public transport through the introduction of safer and climate-friendly vehicles, improved regulation, and industry consolidation.” While the government tries its best to sell PUVM as a key towards better transport, it was not really designed to improve transportation per se in terms of moving capacity to match a growing and diversified population. Instead, the intended main goal of PUVM was to reduce the emission footprint of public transport.

This is not to say that the PUVM is not right, or worse, that it failed. Indeed, it lived up to the intended results, replacing jeepneys which are backyard-fabricated vehicles with decades-old chassis and 15-plus year-old engines, with modern ones, resulting in huge decreases in carbon emissions. In fact, the real main aim of this program was related to the intended nationally determined contribution figures of the Philippines to the Paris Agreement.

A lot of other improvements were carried out as well --air conditioning, provision of wi-fi services in a few cases, automatic fare-collection systems, and probably a basket of other bells and whistles to make our urban transport, well, “modern”.

But the question worth asking is --does it really make our daily commute better? Does it make it faster such that you save a lot of time each day? Does it make it easier so that you don’t have to wait a long time and fight and scramble for a ride each day; or takes only one ride and not two or three with terrible transfers in between? More importantly, did it improve to a point that you decide to take the jeepney instead of your car?