Transit trap

Go stand at a perimeter terminal on a rainy Tuesday evening. Watch the commuters from Oton, Pavia, or Leganes forced to disembark and wait for a second ride just to cross an invisible political line. Iloilo City likes to boast about its 22 percent public transport modernization rate — a figure supposedly “well ahead of the country.”

But what does that number actually mean if you are standing on the pavement for 60 minutes?

A recent World Bank Group study laid bare what every daily wage earner in this city already knows. Our Local Public Transport Route Plan (LPTRP) is choking on its own contradictions. We replaced traditional jeepneys with air-conditioned minibuses, but we kept the exact same predatory, profit-chasing system.

The Public Transport Modernization Program was sold to us as the death of the chaotic boundary system. It was supposed to bring discipline. Instead, it birthed an oligopoly. Just four transport cooperatives now control 81 percent of Iloilo City’s franchises. You would think that level of consolidation makes regulation easier. It hasn’t.

These major players cherry-pick the lucrative, high-density corridors. They deploy overlapping units that clog the main streets while leaving “developmental” routes completely abandoned. It is a phenomenon the World Bank diplomatically calls “route skipping.” I call it treating working-class residents like second-class citizens.

While these ghost routes remain empty, colorum vehicles are multiplying on the main arteries. Where is LTFRB Region 6? Where is the Iloilo City Traffic Management Office? If you hand over a near-monopoly to a few entities, the absolute minimum trade-off must be ruthless enforcement.

The daily commuter absorbs all the friction of this flawed plan. A student or a minimum wage earner cannot afford to bleed an extra PHP 40.00 to PHP 60.00 a day on forced double rides. Public transport is a public utility. It is not a purely commercial venture where unprofitable neighborhoods can simply be cut loose.

But you also cannot expect a driver drowning in debt to run an empty bus out of the goodness of his heart. Operators skip routes because developmental roads lose money.

World Bank specialist Bowen Wang nailed the core issue. He warned that cities must “modernize public transport services rather than concentrating solely on upgrading vehicles.”

To fix this, we need a dedicated local public transport authority to monitor timetables via GPS. More importantly, City Hall and the LTFRB must implement a service contracting model. Subsidize the service. Pay the cooperatives per kilometer run to show up on time on low-density routes, decoupling a driver’s daily survival from the passenger headcount. Set strict timetable KPIs for all 25 LPTRP routes — and if operators chronically skip them, revoke the franchise.

This crisis is ultimately a failure of imagination. Traffic and economic survival do not stop at town arches. Issuing franchises based on rigid administrative boundaries — walling off Iloilo City from the rest of the metropolitan area — defies how humans actually move.

We bought shiny new vehicles and called it the future. But until we treat transit as a right instead of a hustle, we’ll keep sitting in air-conditioned gridlock, waiting for a ride that isn’t coming.