EDITORIAL - A scheme to ease traffic

There’s a development that should help ease traffic jams in Metro Manila. The action comes not from Malacañang, the police or Metropolitan Manila Development Authority, but from the judiciary.

Last week, the Supreme Court upheld an order of the Department of Labor and Employment or DOLE, requiring transport operators to pay fixed salaries to bus drivers and conductors. The order puts an end to the quota or boundary system, under which bus drivers and conductors are paid based on the number of passengers they pick up.

This system is the reason why buses, and even jeepneys and taxi vans linger for a long time at certain areas, turning the stops into their virtual terminals, often with the approval of corrupt traffic cops who look the other way.

This is also the reason why buses and jeepneys crawl along, stopping at almost every street corner and even in the middle of the street just to pick up a single passenger, ignoring designated stops. Drivers won’t follow any rule that reduces their day’s earnings.

With the SC ruling, the next hurdle is implementation. The DOLE order was issued way back in January 2012, but transport operators – a number of them with political connections – have strongly opposed the move. The Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board welcomed the SC order. Now the LTFRB together with the DOLE must enforce the new scheme, without exempting any politician or well-connected transport operator.

Alongside the enforcement of the order, the LTFRB, MMDA, city governments and police must revive efforts to promote fixed schedules of arrivals and departures for certain types of public utility vehicles. A group of PUVs – the new generation electric and solar-powered jeepneys, for example, and new buses – can be selected for a pilot test along a few routes.

Traffic jams make such scheduling schemes unrealistic in Metro Manila, particularly on the busiest roads such as EDSA. Alongside the full enforcement of the fixed salary system, however, it should be easier to try out the scheduling scheme along certain routes.

Transport operators are warning that some of them could be forced to shut down as a result of the fixed salary scheme. The best way to find out if the warning is valid is to implement the fixed salary system without delay.