Democratizing Transportation

 I was attending a transport conference in Bangkok sometime in 2004, when the next speaker, out of the blue, made a presentation on something we don’t normally talk about in transport conference.  He showed a slide showing a man wearing a sort of a wire frame skirt … don’t laugh – it really looks like a skirt, or a petticoat made of wires which were worn by medieval ladies of old.  But this wired frame is quite large, or rather wide, and is in a the shape of a rectangle, 1.5 meters wide by 3 meters long, attached to his belt and covering the ground.

 That area, he said, 4.5 square meters of road space, is what the typical car-owners, claim is theirs, or at least they have the right to, whenever they’re on the road.  No need to argue that everyone knows people fight over every inch of road space, and those 1.5 x 3 meters is the typical dimension of a car.  It’s as if the grounds over which their cars cover are their own personal properties and they have a title to it.  So when many others buy cars, the roads become congested, and people clamor for road widening, or for more new roads.

 Worse is the case of parking space.  How many people complain that government is not providing parking spaces?  And because government really can’t provide for everybody, you see of those streetside parking!  And you see cars being parked on sidewalks!  I wished we could show pictures here but it’s not uncommon to see cars parked on driveways and sidewalks and people walking around them, sometimes on the streets because there is no more space to walk on.

 And since traffic volume always increases while road space remains the same, congestion follows.  And who do the people blame first and foremost?  - the jeepneys!  (or buses, in the case of Metro Manila, particularly EDSA).  Wait a minute – who is utilizing more road space? - the jeepneys or buses which carry 20 to 80 persons per vehicle?  Or the private cars with 1 to 4 passengers?  Back to that most famous internet picture of the comparison of a road with 60 bicycles, 60 cars, and 1 bus – all carries 60 passengers but which one occupies the least space.  The question is which is the most efficient mode?

 The naked reality is that in many democratic countries of the world, ours included, class inequality still exists in the transport sector.  Transport and traffic policies still favor those who can afford to own cars over those who use public transportation for their daily mobility.  Show me a sign anywhere in the country which says, “Cars, no entry!”  No sir, it’s always “Buses, no entry,” or “Jeepneys, no entry,” or no right turn or no left turn, and we do this because we want to control or regulate traffic.  But we try to restrict the mode which carries the most!

 In the column we wrote last March 1, deduced that typically, in Cebu City, private car journeys carry just 12% of trips despite accounting for about 30% of the vehicles on the road, while jeepneys carry 65% of the trips while making up just about 25% of the vehicles on the road.  That’s by number.  In terms of passenger-trips vis-a-vis road space, it’s just like the Pareto principle – 80% of the passengers are carried over 20% of the road space, while 20% of the passengers use 80% of the road space.  Sorry, maybe it’s nearer to 70-30 ratio, but I hope you get the drift.  Now who are those 80%? - they’re the ones who can’t afford cars and uses public transportation.  You know who the other 20% are.  

And I want to share what my good friend, Bernie Arellano, shared on Facebook, about one of Enrique Peñalosa’s famous quotes: “A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars; it’s where the rich use public transportation.”