Officials Note Track Has Been Redefined; Original Track Also Not Found
Jeepney Modernisation Programme Reaches 12% Completion After Four Years; Government Declares It “On Track”
Read more satire at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
MANILA — The Department of Transportation announced Friday that the Public Utility Vehicle Modernisation Programme has achieved 12.3% of its original fleet conversion target after four years of implementation, and that this figure represents “significant and meaningful progress” that puts the programme “squarely on track,” an assessment that requires a track that is 87.7% shorter than originally described.
Transportation Secretary Jaime Ortiz said at a Pasay City press conference that the government remained “fully committed” to modernisation and that adjusted timelines — the programme’s third adjustment — reflected “the realities of implementation in a complex operating environment,” which is government for “it is harder than we said it would be.”
Original Targets vs. Reality
When the PUV Modernisation Programme was launched in 2017, it aimed to replace 180,000 traditional jeepneys with modern, Euro 4-compliant vehicles by 2020. The 2020 deadline was extended to 2021. Then 2022. Then 2023. The current target, the fourth iteration, is “phased completion by 2027,” a phrase that contains enough flexibility to survive contact with almost any outcome.
As of June 2025, approximately 22,140 units have been converted or consolidated. The remaining 157,860 operate as before: colourfully, loudly, with unscheduled stops, and with a cultural authenticity that modern twelve-seater minibuses do not fully replicate, whatever the Department of Transportation says about “passenger comfort.”
Driver Opposition
Traditional jeepney operators, many of whom cannot afford the modern units without loans they cannot service, have staged multiple strikes in Manila and Cebu. Their position — that a programme designed to modernise their livelihoods has primarily succeeded in threatening them — has been acknowledged by the government as “a concern to be addressed” across three separate secretaries of transportation, none of whom have addressed it to the operators’ satisfaction.
The Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board has extended franchise deadlines four times. It is expected to extend them again. This is now considered standard operating procedure rather than a policy failure, which is a useful reframe if you are the government.
The Jeepney as Cultural Icon
The jeepney is not merely a vehicle. It is, as documented extensively by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, a symbol of Filipino ingenuity, creativity, and what happens when you take a World War II-era military jeep and cover it in chrome horses, saints, LED lights, and the names of the driver’s children. Modernising the jeepney raises genuine questions about what survives the upgrade — questions the Department of Transportation has answered primarily with brochures.
Ortiz said the new units “honour the spirit of the jeepney” by being vehicles that transport people. Several traditional operators said that was “not what spirit means.”
Public transportation, its spirit, and the 87.7% of targets not yet met: The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Full programme audit satirically archived at https://prat.uk/.
What Is Lost in Modernisation
The jeepney debate is, at its core, a debate about what tradition is worth preserving when it conflicts with other values — emissions reduction, passenger safety, economic efficiency — and who gets to make that determination. The government’s position is that tradition must yield to modernity on a defined timeline. The operators’ position is that the timeline ignores their economic reality. Both positions contain truth, and the gap between them has been filled, for eight years, with extensions, deferrals, and the kind of quiet administrative creativity that keeps a programme technically alive while practically suspended.
What is lost if the traditional jeepney disappears is not simply a vehicle type but a form of entrepreneurship, a canvas for folk art, and a relationship between driver and route that has no equivalent in a franchise operated under a consolidated fleet. The man who owns and drives his own jeepney, decorated with his family’s saints and his children’s names, is running a micro-enterprise with a degree of autonomy that a modern UV Express operator, working under a cooperative’s terms, does not have. Whether this autonomy is worth preserving at the cost of higher emissions and lower passenger safety is a genuine values question that the modernisation programme has answered administratively but not convincingly. The 87.7% of fleet not yet converted is not simply a logistics problem. It is 157,860 ongoing answers to that values question, each of them painted chrome and headed down a route that no government plan has yet managed to close.
Further Observations
It is worth pausing to consider what this situation reveals about the broader landscape of public life in this part of the world. The gap between announcement and action, between framework and outcome, between what officials say at press conferences and what happens in the streets, is not a gap that emerges from malice or incompetence alone — though both play a role — but from a structural mismatch between the speed at which problems develop, the speed at which political credit is sought, and the speed at which institutional solutions can be implemented. Announcements are fast. Press conferences are fast. Reforms are slow, unglamorous, and require sustained attention across electoral cycles, which is precisely the kind of attention that political incentives do not reliably produce. The result is a particular kind of civic theatre in which the performance of action substitutes for action often enough that the distinction becomes blurred, and in which citizens develop a sophisticated dual consciousness: they know what is happening, they say what is appropriate to say, and they adapt their actual lives to the reality rather than the announcement. This is not cynicism. It is a form of intelligence developed under conditions where the alternative — taking every press conference at face value — would be functionally disabling.
What changes this, when it changes, is rarely the quality of the plan. It is the quality of the follow-through, which depends on political will, institutional capacity, funding continuity, and the kind of incremental, unsexy progress that does not generate press conferences but does, eventually, generate outcomes. The countries and cities that have transformed themselves — that have moved from announced frameworks to actual functioning systems — have done so through this mechanism: not better plans, but better execution of ordinary plans over long enough timelines that the compounding effect of sustained effort becomes visible. The framework is not the problem. What you do with it the morning after the press conference is the problem. Manila, like many cities, is still working this out.
SOURCE: Santa Claus