Running on Empty Tanks and Tummies

Vicente Madero has been driving the Villa Arevalo–Baybay in Iloilo City route for 35 years. These days, a 12-hour shift behind the wheel leaves him with about PHP 100 to take home to his family. It’s barely enough to buy rice, let alone anything to pair it with.

Meanwhile, the Western Visayas Transport Cooperative (WVTC) is bleeding out. They are losing PHP 100,000 a day and haven’t paid their bank amortizations since February. If diesel hits PHP 150 per liter, management admits they might just have to shut the engines off completely.

We’ve spent years arguing over the PUV modernization program, drawing a hard line between traditional operators and consolidated cooperatives. But step up to the pump right now, and that bitter divide completely vanishes. Jhenmark Geronda is protesting on the streets to save his traditional jeepney livelihood, while WVTC President Raymundo Parcon is issuing desperate ultimatums from a boardroom to save his modernized fleet.

At the pump, everyone is losing. And they are all begging for the exact same lifeline: suspend the fuel taxes.

Yet the national government’s response has been agonizingly slow. Officials are busy “studying” fuel tax relief while operators and commuters are already bleeding. When policy response is this delayed — while fares remain locked at PHP 13 for traditional and PHP 15 for modern units — inaction becomes a policy choice. Delay is effectively a tax of its own. It forces the poorest drivers to personally subsidize public mobility out of their own shrinking pockets.

Because of this squeeze, WVTC is drastically cutting its fleet deployment. Drivers who used to work six days a week are being bumped down to a three-day schedule. By Friday, only 30% of the cooperative’s fleet will be on the road.

This is where a transport issue mutates into a full-blown economic crisis.

A crippled public transport fleet is not just any driver’s dilemma. You cannot run a growing, dynamic hub like Iloilo on a 30% weekend transport capacity. Halving the midweek fleet strands commuters, hurts local retail, and slashes the productivity of the entire local workforce. The burden of this crisis is shifting rapidly from the drivers’ empty pockets to the daily lives of every employer and commuter in the city.

Nor it this crisis abstract economics anymore. It is visible in shortened workweeks. It is heard in the voices of mothers like Josie Martinez, who are now forced to budget simply to keep food on the table for a toddler because a day’s labor no longer covers a day’s meals.

When “employment” means you still technically have a job but aren’t allowed enough shifts to survive, the system is broken. Government officials can no longer treat this as routine market pain. The 12% VAT and excise taxes on fuel need to be suspended.

If they wait much longer to act, there won’t just be a strike. The city will simply stop moving.