Stalled out, stranded, and still stuck on oil

Here is a question that should bother everyone who has ever waited for a jeepney in the heat: Why does the government keep treating fuel crises like surprises? Diesel has climbed for 11 straight weeks. Gasoline, nine. The Middle East conflict did not start yesterday. And yet, the Marcos administration suspended a modest fare hike — one already approved through the regulatory process — just one day before it took effect.

That is not compassionate governance. That is policy whiplash, and the people who pay for it are the same ones the president says he is protecting.

The arithmetic is not complicated. Modern jeepney operators in Western Visayas used to spend around PHP 2,500 a day on fuel when diesel sat between PHP 54 and PHP 60 per liter. With diesel now at PHP 103 to PHP 108, fuel costs have ballooned to about PHP 3,500 per trip — before driver and passenger assistant salaries. The approved adjustment would have added PHP 2 to the modern jeepney base fare. Even WVTC President Raymundo Parcon, who lobbied for it, called the increase insufficient. He wanted PHP 7.

So Malacañang scrapped even the inadequate version. And offered, as consolation, a PHP 5,000 one-time cash subsidy.

A driver burning PHP 3,500 per trip across six daily trips will exhaust that subsidy faster than the paperwork takes to process. Parcon put it plainly: drivers can spend it in a day or two. The subsidy is a press release dressed up as policy. It addresses a photo-op cycle, not a fuel-price cycle. And subsidies, as operators know from bitter experience, are frequently delayed. The pain is daily; the relief, if it arrives, is annual.

What happens next is predictable. WVTC has warned it may cut deployment to 50 percent on certain days. Fewer jeepneys means longer waits, packed vehicles, and workers and students scrambling for rides that never come. Commuters do not win when fares stay low on paper but the jeepney that is supposed to carry them does not show up. Freezing fares while fuel keeps rising is not protecting passengers — it is rearranging who suffers.

But the fare fight only scratches at something deeper. The Philippines imports roughly 98 percent of its crude oil, mostly from the Middle East. Oil still powers about 40 percent of the country’s total energy consumption, and actual oil use has grown from 57.4 terawatt hours in 1965 to around 267.6 terawatt hours last year, based on the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy 2025. The country did not reduce its dependence; it just stacked other energy sources on top. So every geopolitical flare-up — the Strait of Hormuz, the Red Sea, wherever — ricochets straight into Iloilo streets, the price of rice, school commutes, and household budgets already stretched thin.

Electrification has barely moved. Only about 5 percent of the country’s 220,000 jeepneys have gone electric under the PUV Modernization Program, and an e-jeepney costs between PHP 1.6 million and PHP 2.8 million — far beyond what most small-scale operators can afford. The government forced modernization, then denied the fare structure to sustain it.

What the sector needs is not more last-minute directives and one-shot handouts. It needs a fare mechanism that automatically adjusts when fuel crosses defined thresholds — predictable, transparent, and insulated from the election cycle. It needs fuel support redesigned as recurring, indexed assistance instead of lump-sum publicity stunts. And it needs serious acceleration of e-jeepney deployment with financing that does not bury cooperatives in debt.

None of that is easy. But the current approach — lurching between fare freezes and subsidy announcements while the country stays tethered to imported oil — is not working. It just makes everyone feel like something is being done, right up until the next price shock.