The “Libreng Sakay” mirage

And here we go again the “Libreng Sakay” dilemma. In August 2020 and May of this year, I wrote a five-part series titled “Transit Service Contracting (for laymen).” Transit service contracting would have been revolutionary --upgrading our perennially-poor public transportation to world-class standards. But it did not, it retrogressed instead daily pictures of throngs of people waiting for hours and fighting for rides in the capital (and in all major cities) lay proof to this. The culprit is “Libreng Sakay (free rides)”.

We only need to look around the world to see that this idea is not something which is universally gaining traction. So far, only Luxembourg and Malta have attempted to offer free public transportation. The ones we traditionally look up to London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc., as epitomes of great public transportation have not, nor do they plan for free public transportation. In fact, common wisdom indicates that free public transportation will even generate unnecessary trips and further burden the system. How much more for still-developing systems like ours.

The goal of Transit Service Contracting is better public transportation service, not a free service! People don’t want free rides, they want easier, dependable, stress-free rides, from home to work and back each single working day. We only have 24 hours each day, eight for sleeping, eight for working, and eight for the rest, and spending 3-4 hours for commuting drastically reduces the time spent for self, family, and other more important things. Waiting and scrambling for rides is something people abhor but are resigned to endure because of the government’s inability to provide better service. Malaysia offered free rides in one of its systems some months ago, but people countered, “We are not looking for free rides, (but for) user-friendly, convenient, frequent, and highly accessible public transport.” The only reason DOTr resorted to free rides before was the institutional difficulty to collect it in the first place --they were at a loss on how to collect so they simply offered it for free! It has absolutely nothing to do with Transit Service Contracting of which they manage to convince Congress to fund without the commensurate collection system.

Now the new administration is simply following suit. Free public transportation is not a reasonable goal, more so with the inadequate public transportation system that we have, and it simply won’t work and will cause the Transit Service Contracting to utterly fail. Incredibly sad considering this would have been the best opportunity for us to upgrade our public transportation to the best standards in the world. Libreng Sakay is a cover-up for a failure, disguised as a government thrust for people’s betterment. If there is any hope left for this scenario, it would be for DOTr to seriously restudy Transit Service Contracting and implement it as how those countries ahead of us had in previous decades. It’s not even that difficult, it just needs the appropriate understanding of what it really is and identifying the proper institutional setup to execute. As I wrote in my last article, the defect and challenge are in the institutional arrangement. And these are not difficult at all.