City Hall says no. That doesn’t end the conversation.

Mayor Raisa Treñas-Chu was straightforward about something: Iloilo City cannot afford a Libreng Sakay program for students. Resources are limited and there is a crisis. The least City Hall can do, she said, is keep the transport sector afloat so fares stay something students can manage.

That is one way to read the budget but there are other ways.

The city has just signed off on a PHP 1.4 billion supplemental budget. Part of it sustains a six-month fuel subsidy — PHP 1,500 per qualified jeepney operator and driver, PHP 500 for tricycle drivers. Another slice will fund a Libreng Sakay for City Hall employees, possibly rolling out by Monday. Students were not in that calculation.

The mayor is not wrong that supporting drivers matters. With diesel above PHP 110 per liter and modern jeepneys burning PHP 4,500 in fuel a day, the math at the terminal is brutal. If operators fold, no one rides — discounted, free, or otherwise. But framing student transport as a binary, drivers or students, lets the city off the hook for what could be done in between.

Start with a number that is already on the books. Republic Act 11314, the Student Fare Discount Act, gives every enrolled Filipino student a 20 percent discount on PUV fares, every day, weekends and summer included. LTFRB has spent years reminding drivers it is not optional.

On the enforcement side, a serious push — random inspections, posted signs at jeepney terminals near UPV, WVSU, CPU, USA, Iloilo Doctors’, and UI, a working complaints hotline — costs the city almost nothing and puts pesos back in student pockets immediately.

Then there is the national program City Hall keeps pointing to. The LTFRB’s Land-Based Service Contracting Program pays modern jeepneys PHP 40 per kilometer and traditional units PHP 30, with a built-in 20 percent commuter discount and an additional 20 percent off for students, seniors, and PWDs. Iloilo City should be lobbying hard — through Region 6, through its congressional representatives — to designate student-priority routes feeding the city’s school clusters.

Closer to home, Santa Barbara, just 10 to 12 kilometers out, rolled out its own Libreng Sakay this month under Executive Order 24. Many of the students paying PHP 25 to Ungka and another PHP 15 into the city proper come from those neighboring towns. A provincial-LGU cost-sharing arrangement — Iloilo City, the province, and feeder municipalities chipping in for shuttle runs to major campuses — is not a fantasy and it only requires a phone call.

None of this requires declaring a state of calamity. None of it pretends the city’s coffers are deeper than they are.

What it requires is for us to stop treating “we cannot afford it” as a closing argument. Students are not asking for a free ride out of entitlement. They are asking, reasonably, why the same city that found a bus for its employees cannot find a route for them.