Palliative pennies

Look at the new fare matrix taped to the dashboard of your morning ride. As of this week, climbing into a traditional jeepney costs at least PHP 14. If you want the air-conditioned privilege of a modernized unit, prepare to shell out PHP 17 just to sit down (or, in most cases, stand).

No one is villainizing the drivers. When fuel prices spike and basic maintenance costs skyrocket, a fare adjustment is a survival mechanism. A private-sector worker in the city, captured the grim reality perfectly: “I would actually agree with the fare increase because drivers are also struggling… But my salary isn’t increasing.”

That right there is the core rot in this policy. When regional wage boards remain completely passive while the transport matrix is adjusted for inflation, a fare hike becomes a de facto pay cut. For a student taking multiple rides or a minimum-wage earner, an extra PHP 8 to PHP 12 a day easily bleeds hundreds of pesos a month from an already tight budget. That is a few kilos of rice stripped directly from a family’s table just so they can physically get to work.

And what exactly are we paying for? That PHP 17 base fare – a steep PHP 3 premium over traditional units – is essentially a hidden commuter tax. The PUV Modernization Program is structurally flawed, relying almost entirely on daily wage earners to shoulder the massive financial burden of upgrading the national transport fleet. The government quietly knows the math doesn’t work. It is why they are scrambling to hand out PHP 20,000 in monthly bailouts to qualified transport cooperatives just so these groups don’t drown in their loan obligations. Progress is a failure if it prices the most vulnerable out of basic mobility.

Even when the government does try to help, the subsidies are glaringly discriminatory. Take the Association of Taxi Operators in Panay (ATOP). President Perfecto Yap rightly called out the absurdity. While jeepneys and UV Express units get a PHP 12 per-liter fuel discount, taxis are left completely on empty. This is despite the fact that over 80% of ATOP units have already modernized.

The downstream effect is immediate. When a taxi driver realizes they are burning more money in gas than they are earning, they simply cut their hours and head home. Transport availability shrinks for everyone. A mode-agnostic subsidy program that targets the actual fuel burden, regardless of the vehicle type, shouldn’t be this hard to conceptualize.

Instead, we are spoon-fed palliative pennies. Transport groups originally petitioned for a PHP 5 hike to establish a genuine buffer against volatile pump prices. They got a fraction of that, paired with fuel discounts capped at a restrictive 30 liters a day for five days — a logistical headache offering zero operational stability.

It is exactly why groups are taking over Jaro Plaza to protest. These incremental hikes are lazy, stop-gap measures. Until Congress finds the political spine to revisit the Downstream Oil Industry Deregulation Act of 1998 and critically re-evaluate our fuel taxes, nothing changes.

We will simply keep forcing the underpaid commuter to subsidize the underpaid driver, while the people setting the policies never have to look at a fare matrix again.