Jeepneys may be considered by many as a pesky lot, being old, dilapidated and terrible smoke-belchers that deserve to be phased out under the Department of Transportation’s (DOTr) transport-modernization program.
While a phaseout looks good, having been crafted by scented and well-heeled policy-makers of the Aquino administration, many of whom favor more big businesses, on the contrary, there are also equally convincing technical arguments proposing a face-lift for jeepneys
instead of a phaseout.
Modernization is for big boys? Transport modernization, unwittingly, favors big businesses because it calls for a vehicle or engine replacement, which can mean a P150-billion replacement market for vehicle manufacturers, dealers and the banks doing all the financing.
While it is good for them, it will mean an added burden to the drivers,
who will pay the amortizations.
It also calls for some centralization or clustering to be managed by professional “fleet managers” along the traditional, more efficient big business corporate models.
While market-oriented big business models are efficient in terms of economies of scale, they reverse government’s thrust toward more inclusivity. If efficiency is a problem, there are multiple ways to achieve this, and still retain the current ownership structures and
business models.
Jeepneys are microbusinesses. Most jeepneys, including the ubiquitous tricycles nationwide, are micro home-based businesses. Operators own one or just a few units. Only a few operators own more than 10 units, which are distributed to their children. Proof that many jeepneys are owned by ordinary people is the fact some of their bumper tail flaps carry messages, like “katas ng Saudi” (juice of Saudi).
Jeepneys provide so much employment and livelihood. Apart from the operator, who earns the daily “boundary income”, jeepneys provide employment to two drivers per unit.
Thus, many jeepney groups oppose transport modernization, if it translates to a phase out. Unfortunately, most oppose without taking steps themselves to comply with the program’s goals.
New jeepney group rises to the need. A new group, the National Jeepney Federation for Environmental Sustainable Transport (NJFEST), headed by Ronald Baroidan, has responded seriously to the clarion call, even adopting DOTr’s Environmental Sustainable Transport (EST) strategy to its name, but still opposing a phase out on the argument there is no guarantee a brand-new vehicle will not be a smoke-belcher after purchase. Experience shows this is a “nonsequitur” as it does not necessarily follow.
For Baroidan, jeepney drivers are the usual whipping boy of “legal” bullies from traffic enforcers, to erring cops, and to anomalous private emission testing centers, which practice rampant corrupt “nonappearance” emission compliance that do not really conduct actual testing.
Penalties won’t reduce emissions. Once caught for smoke-belching, no one tells them solutions, so they go out again only to get caught and penalized anew. So they are forced to bribe their way to continue driving. But no amount of penalties or frequency of arrests will reduce emissions, nor will a vehicle or engine replacement really reduce emissions. Section 46 of the Clean Air Act requires that apart from penalties, violators must undergo a seminar on emission reduction.
Section 11 mandates that government must make available all the information on best practices, techniques and technological options on pollution control, thereby empowering motorists on making more intelligent choices. But this can’t be done fully as Section 15 on Air Pollution Research remains unfunded and unimplemented.
It is ironic that Researchers for Clean Air (ResCueAir), a group of scientists and researchers from academe led by Prof. Edgar Vallar, PhD, from De La Salle and Mylene Cayetano, PhD, from UP Diliman, even spent their own personal
money to bring in German experts and equipment to study black carbon in our ambient air, in the absence of support from the government. And yet, there are hundreds of millions of pesos with Department of Environment and Natural Resources’s (DENR) Air Quality Management Fund, and there’s P8.5 billion with DOTr’s Special Vehicle Pollution Control Fund that remain untapped.
JEEEP on the go, but blocked? Against threats of a phase out, NJFEST sought Environmental Management Bureau-National Capital Region (EMB-NCR) Director Minda Osorio’s help to jointly launch the Jeepney for the Environment and Energy-Efficient Program (JEEEP), which attempts to develop a seminar template implementing both Section 11 and Section 46, even in the absence of funds.
Engr. Dave Garcia, NJFEST’s consultant, said the JEEEP lecture-seminar is good as starters, but there is no substitute to hands-on practical learning, and making trial tests on all the techniques, best practices and technological options available.
After all, there is no substitute to experiential learning. Similarly, one can never learn how to drive or swim by reading guidebooks, without actual physical driving or swimming. NJFEST requests if the EMB-NCR can fund their research by buying for them the numerous little items, such as lubricants, filters, gadgets and additives, etc., which form part of a package of solutions for several test-jeepneys, all totaling less than P100,000. Unfortunately, admin-finance says the EMB-NCR can’t do this as what is only allowable is food for seminars, which tells NJFEST “how to cheat” unnecessarily by producing official receipts from a caterer and bloat the number of participants along with pictures as proof. As the caterer needs to get a cut for this, this reduces the net amount, and triggers unnecessary suspicions of shady deals.
What’s dirty with our air. This is ironic as the DENR purchases hundreds of millions of pesos worth of ambient air monitoring stations every year from the same supplier, almost on a negotiated basis. Worst, most are not functioning, and if they do, most can’t read real time. And for the few upgraded with real-time loggers with the EMB-NCR, that can now read real time, they are still inaccurate as the base equipment are considered obsolete, and have a high 25-percent deviation in accuracy, far from the world standard of 2.5 percent.
The government must invest on solutions to emissions at source, and not on yearly purchases of these monitoring stations that only reads how polluted the air is. Unless monitoring can do real-time measurement for more accurate averaging, readings will be erratic as air turbulence from sea breeze, for example, can alter actual results.
If we are truly serious to clean the air and mitigate climate change, let’s change the climate of governance, starting with the overhaul of ridiculous bureaucratic practices.
Few will know, fuel is “it”. As we keep on blaming the driver and the government for many of the problems, including air pollution, few will know that the main culprit is the presence of polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), the compounds present in Light Cycle Oil, which is a waste product of refineries that are blended by as much as 11 percent of diesel. It is the PAHs that are producing the black carbon.
For so long, few will know this matter present in fuel. But with the information explosion and the pollution up in the air, there is no way, in the end, for oil companies to proverbially “sweep this dirt in the air under the rug.” So before we phase out and blame jeepneys, let’s face the facts first.
E-mail: mikealunan@yahoo.com