Public transpo vs. the bureaucracy

Price is the best signal for people to alter their consumption of particular goods and services. When the price of their favorite consumption commodities go down, they will consume more of them. When the price goes up, they will consume less, even stop buying, if alternative commodities and services are available. Taking public transportation, aside from car-pooling with other family members and friends, is the usual alternative for people who opt not to use their car more often.

Since government leaders always say that they are there to render public service, then they should make life easier for the citizens. Since more and more people are opting to take public transportation, then government should make life easy for people who provide public transportation – tricycles, jeepneys, taxis and vans for hire, buses, and trains. But is it really easy for businessmen and entrepreneurs who provide said public transportation?

To operate any of the above-mentioned public transportation except trains, there are immediately 2 taxes and fees to pay: annual vehicle registration tax (plus smoke-belching test fee) and franchise tax. While the former is easier to get since the tax also applies to private and government vehicles, the latter is more bureaucratic and costly. The tax for vans for hire (aka fx taxis) for instance, is about P60,000 for a 5-year franchise.

With spiralling oil prices, fares naturally have to increase. The government’s Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board (LTFRB) charge a fee of P540 per jeepney (16-18-seater vehicles on average) for the new fare matrix, and there are tens of thousands of jeepneys in Metro Manila alone. One can consider this as “fare matrix tax” since this is mandatory. Government thinks fare hike is a function of having that single piece of paper from the LTFRB, not a function of oil price hikes. So even if fuel prices and fuel taxes have been increasing but a jeepney driver does not have that single piece of paper, the police will apprehend and fine the driver for being a “law violator”.

For cabs, their taxi meter should be calibrated accordingly. Either the agency staff are too lazy and inefficient or too few because the lines of taxis waiting for their taxi meters to be calibrated is very long, and they normally take hours, even days, queuing up, not earning anything, waiting for their turn. The cost of meter testing and calibration, according to a taxi driver that I talked to, is around P3,000 per taxi. Again, there are thousands of taxis in Metro Manila alone. One can consider this as “taxi meter calibration tax”. If a taxi driver does not have his meter re-calibrated, despite the spiralling of fuel prices and fuel taxes, then technically he is not allowed to adjust his fare upwards and the police will apprehend and fine him for, again, being a “law violator”.

For fx and vans, since they travel on car pool, meter calibration does not apply to them. What restricts them is the high franchising cost + the red tape and briberies involved in getting a franchise. That is why many vans and fx are running without, or with an expired, a franchise, aka “colorum” public vehicles.

The trains. Currently there are 3 train lines operational in Metro Manila. The busiest and the one which I usually take is the mass transit system (MRT) along Edsa, the busiest road network in the country. The MRT attracts hundreds of thousands of passengers everyday. Tens of thousands of potential passengers however, are turned off and do not take the train for several reasons, among them: (a) trains always full and there not enough trains coming in even during peak and busiest hours, (b) long lines to get a ticket, and (c) absence of ticket vending machines.

Sometimes “stored value tickets” (P100 per ticket which one can use several times so as not to queu everytime he/she rides the train) are not available. And so the previously long lines have become longer as frequent riders have to queu everytime they use the train. Like the long lines of taxis waiting for their meter recalibration, on many hours of the day, either the government personnel (under the Dept. of Transportation and Communication, DOTC) in charge of issuing tickets are either too slow and inefficient or too few to attend to the long lines of passengers. Some staff in the ticket booth are either resting or moving around doing something else, some ticket booths are closed, while the long lines remain for many hours.

If those staff are unhappy with their work and show laziness in attending to the long lines of passengers, then government (or whoever operates the trains) should replace them with vending machines. The machines don’t take lunch or snack breaks, don’t take leaves, don’t get tired and don’t show unhappiness in performing a function they were especially created for, except when they are out of order and not properly maintained.

One may wonder why Metro Manila, despite having 11 million residents (nearly the combined population of Hong Kong and Singapore), does not have plenthy of operating train lines despite the long lines of investors willing to put in their money, time and technology. Metro Manila’s population actually bloats up to around13 million people during day time, when people from nearby provinces come to conduct various businesses and transactions in the capital region.