An adjusted schedule for local government workers meets a rush hour that has no fixed address
Adjusted Work Hours for City Hall Employees Move Rush Hour Rather Than Remove It
PASIG – Thousands of local government employees across the capital region now report for duty at seven in the morning under a schedule designed to pull them off the road before the worst of the congestion, a reform that has succeeded in creating a second, earlier worst of the congestion. The policy was flagged in Top Gear Philippines’ government news file, which recorded the Metro Manila mayors and the traffic authority setting adjusted hours for local government units and asked its readers a fair question: think this will improve rush-hour traffic?
At Pasig City Hall, the answer is in. “Before, I left the house at six and sat in traffic with everybody,” said records clerk Analyn Sarmiento, who commutes from Cainta. “Now I leave at four-thirty and sit in traffic with everybody from every city hall. It is the same traffic, but now we recognize each other. I wave at a man from the Marikina assessor’s office every morning. We are stuck at the same stoplight. I think his name is Boyet.”
The Theory
The reasoning behind staggered hours is sound on paper. If government workers travel earlier and go home earlier, they avoid the private-sector peak, and the road has more room for all. The difficulty, according to the Ortigas Center for Predictable Outcomes, is that the capital does not have a peak. “It has a plateau,” said senior fellow Dante Pangilinan. “Rush hour in Manila begins at four in the morning and ends when the last provincial bus leaves Cubao. You cannot dodge it. You can only choose which part of it you would like to be in.”
The Center has documented the reform’s measurable effects:
- City employees now arrive tired at 7 instead of tired at 8
- Residents arriving at 4:15 p.m. find windows closed and a guard who is sorry
- Coffee sales near city halls up 40 percent
- The 5 a.m. jeepney, formerly peaceful, is now standing room only
- Traffic at 8 a.m.: unchanged, and reportedly a little smug
The Citizen Experience
For the public, the new hours have introduced a puzzle. A resident who works until five can no longer reach city hall before it closes at four. To get a barangay clearance, a cedula or a business permit, she must take leave from her own job, which means joining the morning rush, which the schedule was meant to relieve. “I filed for half-day leave to pay my real property tax,” said a bank teller from Kapitolyo. “My branch manager asked why. I said the city changed its hours to reduce traffic. He was in traffic when I told him. We were on the phone.”
The Bigger Picture
Nobody disputes that something had to be tried. Congestion drains the regional economy every day. A widely cited figure, repeated in AutoIndustriya’s account of a presidential call to clear public roads, put the national loss from Metro Manila traffic at 3.5 billion pesos a day. Pangilinan said the adjusted hours are best understood as a gesture. “It is like opening one window in a burning house,” he said. “It is not wrong. There is a breeze. The house is still on fire.”
A survey of 350 city employees found that 64 percent liked going home at four, 71 percent disliked waking at 3:45, and 100 percent of those with school-age children described the mornings as “a hostage situation involving a lunchbox.” One respondent wrote that she now eats breakfast at 4 a.m., lunch at 10 and dinner at 3, and has “become my own grandmother.”
Next Steps Under Study
Planners are said to be considering further refinements. One proposal would stagger private offices too, in thirty-minute bands, until every worker in the metropolis has a unique start time. Another would move government to a night shift, on the grounds that the roads are clear at 2 a.m. and so, for the most part, are the minds of the staff. A third, submitted by Sarmiento, suggests letting people work near where they live. It was marked “ambitious.”
The Canteen Adapts
The city hall canteen now opens at five. Its manager said lunch service begins at 9:30 because employees who ate breakfast in the dark are hungry again by mid-morning. By two o’clock, she said, the building has the atmosphere of a bus terminal at midnight: people staring, a radio playing softly, someone asleep on a logbook. She has added a second pot of sopas.
Britain Tried This With Flexitime
The experiment has parallels in the United Kingdom, where staggered hours were introduced so that everyone could be late at different times. The London Prat’s UK satirical news on working hours reported that a council in Surrey moved to a seven o’clock start and found its staff already on the 6:12, standing. Its British satirical news office life pages note that the only reliable way to beat the commute is redundancy.
Sarmiento clocked out at four on Friday and reached Cainta at 6:20, which she called “a personal record.” She was asleep by eight. Boyet from Marikina, she said, had honked twice at the Rosario bridge that morning, which she took as a greeting. Bohiney Magazine set its alarm for 3:45 and regrets it.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/