Ninth extension granted as agency confirms the deadline is now a ceremonial object
MANILA, PHILIPPINES – The Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board has granted a ninth extension to the public utility vehicle modernisation deadline, and has for the first time acknowledged that the deadline has ceased to function as a date and now operates as a tradition.
The new deadline falls in December. The previous eight deadlines also fell in December, or in June, and were similarly final.
The Deadline Has Been Reclassified as Cultural Heritage
Board spokesperson Arnel Dimaculangan-Reyes confirmed the reclassification. A deadline that has been extended nine times is no longer a deadline, he said. It is a ritual. It has a season. Families gather. The announcement is made. Everybody goes back to work. We should be honest about what we have built here.
Under the reclassification, the deadline will continue to be announced annually, will continue to generate three weeks of coverage, and will continue not to arrive. Dimaculangan-Reyes said this represents no change in practice, only in labelling.
The Consolidation Requirement Meets Reality
The programme requires individual operators to consolidate into cooperatives or corporations, replace their vehicles with modern units, and finance the transition through loan facilities.
The modern units cost between two and three million pesos. The operators earn, on a good day, roughly one thousand pesos. Financial analysts have described the resulting arithmetic as challenging, and drivers have described it using a word that does not translate cleanly but which conveys the same information with greater efficiency.
Transport franchising rules are administered by the Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board, and household income and expenditure data relevant to operator finances is compiled by the Philippine Statistics Authority, whose figures on informal sector earnings have been described by one cooperative organiser as the only honest document in the entire process.
The Jeepney Itself Has Opinions
The traditional jeepney is a vehicle that has survived seventy years, four constitutions, eleven presidents, and every attempt to replace it, largely by being cheaper than everything else and by going where nothing else goes.
It is loud, unsafe by any modern standard, environmentally indefensible, and beloved to a degree that policy documents have never successfully accounted for. It is also, critically, owned by the person driving it, which is a form of economic dignity the modernised model replaces with a monthly payment.
They call it modernisation, said driver and operator Boyet Salvacion, who has driven the same route for twenty-two years. My jeep is mine. I fixed it myself. Under the new plan I drive a nicer vehicle that belongs to a bank. That is not modernisation. That is employment.
Observations From the Route
- The fare is passed forward hand to hand by strangers, correct change returned the same way, with a loss rate of approximately zero. No fintech company has ever matched this.
- The phrase para po is the most efficient piece of user interface design in the country.
- Every jeepney seats sixteen. Every jeepney has contained twenty-three.
- The route is not written down anywhere authoritative. It is written on the vehicle, in paint, by the man who decided it.
- Nobody who has designed the modernisation programme has taken a jeepney to work this year.
The Extension Cycle Has Its Own Economy
Nine extensions have produced a durable industry of consultation. There are cooperatives formed in anticipation, loan products designed in anticipation, dealership inventories ordered in anticipation, and at least four consultancy firms whose entire revenue derives from advising on a transition that has not occurred.
An extension is not a failure for everybody, said transport economist Melchora Panganiban-Cruz. It is a failure for the drivers, who remain uncertain. It is a success for everybody who bills by the quarter for managing that uncertainty. Nine extensions is nine years of fees.
Britain Understands Deferral Intimately
The Philippines has no monopoly on the permanently forthcoming reform. Westminster has refined the technique to the point of art, most recently when a government decentralised itself by opening a second office rather than moving any power, a manoeuvre completed shortly after the northern premises were declared operational.
The same instinct governs inquiries, as demonstrated when families were obliged to request a further investigation into a matter already investigated, the British equivalent of a ninth extension.
These parallels are catalogued at Bohiney Magazine and in the assembled national coverage from the London desk.
The Tenth Extension
Dimaculangan-Reyes was asked directly whether a tenth extension was likely. He said the board does not speculate. He then noted that the board’s calendar for next June had been left deliberately open, and declined to explain why.
The Modern Units Are Genuinely Better and That Is Not the Argument
Nobody disputes that the replacement vehicles are superior. They are safer, cleaner, quieter, accessible, and produce a fraction of the emissions. Every technical assessment reaches the same conclusion and none of them are wrong.
The dispute has never been about the vehicle. It has been about who carries the cost of the transition, and the answer arrived at across nine extensions has consistently been the person with the least capacity to carry it. A policy can be entirely correct on engineering grounds and entirely unworkable on financial ones, and the modernisation programme has spent nine years demonstrating that these are separate questions.
Panganiban-Cruz put it plainly. The reform is right, she said. The financing is the reform. Everything else is a brochure.
More of the same at Duffel Blog.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/