What The Government Doesn’t Understand About EDSA

What The Government Doesn’t Understand About EDSA

Via Anahaw

Always trying to fix the symptoms, not the disease

If you’ve been living under a rock the past few days, you might have missed the news that the MMDA is planning to completely ban driver-only cars in EDSA, the most vital swath of road in Manila, during rush hour. While the MMDA’s attempt to nudge people into practicing carpooling is laudable, yesterday’s dry run has shown that people who are alone in their cars added hours to their commute which only previously took minutes.

It’s something we’ve seen over and over before: people in government try to address the symptom of a problem rather than the cause, and end up making things horribly, horribly worse. While it seems that sheer vehicle volume in EDSA and in Manila is the main culprit for our crippling traffic problem, authorities don’t realize that the lack of comfortable, accessible public transport is the main cause of the explosion in vehicles on the roads. It’s the same reason why people who have no business buying a car, who can’t afford its monthly amortization, buy one anyway: wasting away in traffic is infinitely more comfortable in your own car than it is in a crowded MRT coach, bus or UV transport.

There are solutions to this traffic hell, solutions that don’t require building new trains or tracks. It just requires a bit of backbone and political will that seems to be abundant nowadays.

If there’s anything that would immediately alleviate traffic, it is making the boundary system illegal. The boundary system, for people who don’t know, is the most favored employment practice in nearly every public utility service that plies the streets. It goes like this: the driver pays a fixed rate to basically “rent” the vehicle he drives, may it be a taxi, bus or jeepney. Anything over that fixed rate he gets to keep as his profit for the day.

The boundary system is, simply put, modern day slavery. Because of this system, drivers have to complete a certain amount of trips to simply break even. It encourages and incentivizes reckless driving on the road. While it’s easy to cuss out insane PUV drivers that stop everywhere they damn please and drive like maniacs, the system that employs them literally requires them to behave this way or they starve.

This also means that many of the drivers and conductors do not have any kind of health insurance, health benefits or 13th month pay many of us to enjoy. Removing it and making sure that drivers get FIXED salaries no matter how many trips they make will drastically improve traffic flow since they are no longer racing each other on the street to pick up passengers. It will also mean that taxis will be less liable to be choosy when it comes to picking up passengers, because they get paid no matter how many trips they complete.

Once you fix that, you can start fixing where PUVs go. Mandated pick-up points have been suggested, tried, trialed, abandoned, and suggested again and again and they always fail for one simple reason: adhering to them means drivers will lose money because of the boundary system.

With no reason NOT to follow mandated pickup points, you’ll have better coverage for PUVs, regular stops as well as reduced instances of PUV drivers treating the road like their own personal terminal.

The Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board can also contribute to reducing the overall number of cars by loosening rules in what they perceive as colorum vehicles. Under their strict interpretation of colorum rules, anything that promotes carpooling that accepts payment is colorum. If you drive with your friends to work and you accept money for driving them even for gas money, the LTFRB interprets that as being colorum.

Obviously, this is ridiculous, and is the antithesis of what the MMDA is trying to do. Even something as simple as increasing the number of accredited TNVs on the road would mean less cars. Personally, I’d be willing to leave my car at home if I knew I wouldn’t have to wait forever to book one or pay through the nose once one accepted my trip.

There’s a lot of things that the government can do to help alleviate traffic not only in EDSA, but in the metro as a whole. It’s obvious that the MMDA is again addressing the symptom instead of seriously looking at the cure. People buy and bring cars because there is NO COMFORTABLE, PRACTICAL and VIABLE way to for the middle class to commute to their workplace. There’s many solutions to fix the problem: banning cars from a city’s main artery isn’t one.

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