Like a drowning victim who has been gasping for breath in the more than a year and a half of enforced quarantines that limited, if not, severely restrict public transportation – our jeepneys, buses and pedicabs that are the backbone of urban life and makes possible the movement and commerce of the masses of people on our streets; the public transport sector is being resuscitated bit by bit or should we say, breath by breath. Some positive movements are shedding new rays of hope for our transport workers, owners and operators as the Department of Transportation (DOTr) has been trying to up the capacity of our public conveyances from the previous 50 percent seating (which is not even breakeven) to 70 percent and even to 100 percent capacity.
There is a general feeling that with the Alert Level status of Metro Manila reduced to 2 from the previous 3 ranking due to falling COVID19 infection rates which is just about 2,303, the lowest since March 2021, according to the DOH that some sort of normality is returning back and that people could resume their work and outdoor activities given individual and/or family precautions particularly for those venturing out of their homes with their children most of which have yet to be vaccinated. So it is but logical to assume that if people are once again out into the streets in huge numbers and need the means to take them where they want to go or to work, then we have to get our public transport system more or less geared up and ready to serve the public enmasse.
But getting the system back to speed is not as easy as flicking a switch. Transportation has been hard hit and people have accumulated debts, loans from relatives, pawned items, unpaid credit from the corner sari-sari stores, etc. and are still hurting. That is why I join Senator Grace Poe in her call for “quick response from authorities tasked to deal with the mounting problems of the public transport sector, topped by inadequate government assistance and delays in payments under the service contracting scheme.” She said transport authorities must make sure all government assistance for the transport sector is implemented well and fast, as drivers reel from a series of oil price hikes even while being barred from raising fares. The good Senator acknowledged the brewing unrest in the transport sector that needs to be addressed quickly to avert inconvenience to commuters.
She pointed to the unsettled P20 million that LTFRB has yet to pay for service contracting. Moreover, as for the recent government service to provide P1 billion in cash aid to over 170,000 transport workers, Poe slammed its poor implementation. According to her, “Congress has allocated nearly P6 billion for service contracting, but they spent less than P1 billion. That’s money—we know how money rolls and primes the economy. You give that to displaced transport workers so they have temporary jobs and their families can spend it, and in turn help the businesses that supply what they need.”
For its part, the DOTr in a press release said that the livelihood of public transport drivers and operators were severely affected with passenger capacity in public transport maintained at 50 percent. “Increasing passenger capacity will mean a higher revenue for the public transport sector. This will be a welcome development, considering the increase in expenses brought by increasing fuel prices,” the agency said in its petition to the Inter-Agency Task Force for the Management of Emerging Infectious Diseases (IATF). According to Transportation Assistant Secretary Steve Pastor, the DOTr has submitted to the IATF its formal position paper on the increase in passenger capacity for public transport and pointing to a previous stand by Secretary Arthur Tugade against any fare increase amid soaring fuel prices.
He said studies have shown that reliance on complete face mask use and partial hand sanitizer use were proven enough to contain three very modest COVID-19 waves while preserving normal bus services. “Other studies have also revealed that passengers in the high-risk zones (seats in the same row with an infected passenger and within three rows) had moderate but not significantly higher risk, and that ‘rigid’ safe distancing rules are an oversimplification based on outdated science and experiences of past viruses,” the agency said. Evidence also suggests that high vaccination rate prompts an increase in allowed public utility vehicle capacity. Metro Manila, with 81.4 percent of its population now fully vaccinated against COVID-19, is the ideal place to test the proposal,” the DOTr said.
And here we come face to face with the impact that the pandemic has on the nation’s economy and the well-being of every Filipino: escalating prices because manufacturing is down, farms have been neglected, the supply-chain is broken, etc. So the time to start sorting out the economy and picking up the pieces is now upon us and the challenges are formidable and the impacts of COVID still being felt by most Filipinos. According to human rights lawyer and senatorial aspirant Chel Diokno, “Many of us who have not yet recovered from the pandemic are further burdened by rising prices of food and other commodities. Even those who are more comfortable in life are also feeling the rise of prices today.” There is hard work and sound and workable solutions that must now be put in place to lift our people up and realize that a new day has come after a long period of darkness.