By Leonardo Micua

 

ON our way home to Bonuan Thursday afternoon, we passed by the holding garage of the Dagupan Bus on Arellano Street to see it finally opened, which could mean it might soon join the fleet of provincial buses now plying from Dagupan and Pangasinan to Cubao and vice versa.

But not far from there, the impounding garage of Solid North bus, a sister company of Dagupan bus, remains close although the former’s terminal on Perez Boulevard is now open and fielding buses to its usual route to Metro Manila.

If, indeed, Dagupan Bus is raring to field its units to serve Pangasinan commuters going to Metro Manila, this is a welcome development. Because of the pandemic, all their buses and those of the other bus companies grounded to a halt and just confined these in their respective garages.

In fact, the terminal stations of Dagupan Bus and Solid North were padlocked during the pandemic, spawning speculations they were no longer interested in staging a comeback or may have gone bankrupt because of their tremendous losses.

Remember, all bus operators opted to keep their buses in their respective garages, rather than take the gambit of resuming their trips if their buses will be required to unload their passengers in Bocaue, Bulacan where the Iglesia ni Kristo offered their terminal even for free initially.

With Alert Level 1 now declared all over Luzon and practically on all parts of the country, and pretty soon on Alert Level 0, can the LTFRB still restrain the buses from resuming to ply along their old lines without any more restrictions in accordance with their respective franchises that are presumably still in effect these days?

However, as we were writing this column,  the news that the LTFRB will no longer require buses to load and unload their passengers at the NLET Bocaue terminal exchange was flashed on TV. What a relief!

*          *          *          *

But there is another big blow that could hit the transportation industry right on its solar plexus  in Pangasinan and other parts of the country. LTFRB is bent on enforcing a plan to reduce routes of jeepneys plying  every town and city just barely three months before a new administration takes over.  

Adding insult to injury is the pronouncement that jeepney drivers plying routes to be phased out will have to be assisted in finding other productive livelihood projects, which LTFRB knows are scarce even during the post-pandemic era.  

Jeepney drivers and operators are protesting the move, which will be done at the behest of LTFRB, not the provincial government, as many of them will surely be displaced and join the ranks of unemployed.

In fact, some jeepney drivers are bent on stopping plying their routes because of the higher price of diesel impacted by the war in Ukraine.  They are urging LTFRB and its mother agency, the DOTr to shelve the plan which sounds  like it is a midnight deal, as the Duterte administration is exiting in just three months.

Some suspect the jeepney route reduction plan is tied to the Jeepney Modernization Plan that only met with little success since there were only few takers. There was a strong resistance to the prohibitive list price of the modern jeepneys, and the drivers and operators were reluctant to form cooperatives to operate and amortize in banks the units to be purchased. 

I am not saying that such a plan is anti-poor but it would be if agencies will muscle in on it way and enforce it even if the transport sector is totally against it. 

Share your Comments or Reactions

comments

Powered by Facebook Comments