Unexpected roadblock

If anything, peeved jeepney drivers caught our public transportation bureaucrats working butt naked, as in the common metaphorical expression — "the emperor has no clothes."

Why are our transport officials naked? Well, judging from recent events they don't seem to know what to do next following their short-lived feat of consolidating jeepney drivers and operators into cooperatives or corporations.

(The Department of Transportation requires jeepney operators to form cooperatives or corporations before applying for new franchises for modern jeepneys, hence, consolidation.)

They're even portrayed as toothless. In the past few days, rebellious jeepney drivers have openly challenged transport officials to penalize them for violating the consolidation requirements, the first step in implementing the government's ambitious Public Utility Vehicle Modernization Program or PUVMP.

"We will continue to ferry passengers on our routes because the LTFRB (Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board) gave us a one-month extension. If there's any confusion as to how this will be enforced, it's not our problem anymore," said Mody Floranda, president of Pagkakaisa ng mga Samahan ng Tsuper at Opereytor Nationwide (Piston) last Tuesday.

To understand Piston's challenge, the LTFRB, on 22 December, issued a memo allowing public utility vehicles that hadn't consolidated by the 31 December deadline to continue to operate on selected routes until the end of this month.

Additionally, the memo said unconsolidated PUVs could operate on only two kinds of routes: those routes with no consolidated transport services and those with less than 60 percent consolidated PUV units.

Such requirements, however, can't be enforced without the LTFRB officially identifying the routes where unconsolidated PUVs are allowed.

As I write this, the LTFRB has yet to release any sort of list of such PUV routes nationwide, which has prompted enforcement questions.

"The LTFRB is not yet even telling us which routes have reached 60-percent consolidation. How will enforcers apprehend us?" asked Mar Valbuena, president of transport group Malayang Alyansa ng Bus Employees at Laborers or Manibela.

Similarly, lawyers of transport groups challenging the PUV modernization program before the Supreme Court maintain that the government should have ironed out its route planning before proceeding with the consolidation.

"How can you modernize public transport using old, obsolete routes?" lawyer Neri Colmenares asked in an interview with a daily, adding, "What kind of modernization are they even expecting without a route rationalization plan?"

While jeepney groups aren't explicitly saying it, they suggest that transport officials didn't do their homework insofar as identifying the routes the unconsolidated PUVs could ply.

For obvious reasons, the transport officials couldn't just put out haphazard or fantasy routes.

Still, even if we grant that the officials were hard at work on how to proceed, it turns out they're facing a case of the proverbial "easier said than done." 

Under a previous Department of Transportation order, local governments were supposed to craft their own local public transport plans, or LPTRPs, for a more organized and efficient transport system in their localities.

The LPTRP is the minimum requirement for the issuance of PUV franchises.

But the LTFRB admits that most local governments are remiss in these plans, with only 9.82 percent of the country's 1,600 local government units having drawn up LPTRPs.

Furthermore, one critic told a newspaper that the LTFRB "only issued guidelines on how to do an LPTRP. It couldn't require (LGUs) to do it."

With regard to Metro Manila, a newspaper reported in 2018 that transport officials had contracted a consulting firm to assess current transport routes in the greater Manila area and the nearby provinces of Bulacan, Cavite, Laguna and Rizal.

Since then, it seems nothing has been heard of the contracted firm.

At any rate, what this all means is that in the rush to modernize PUVs, transport officials opened a new can of worms reeking of the government's inefficiencies.