Prescription: Buy out the jeepneys, solve social distancing, and reform the transportation system
A proposal to use the pandemic stimulus to reform informal transportation
“A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” Nobel Laureate Paul Romer
Metro Manila runs on privately provided public transportation. The jeepneys and buses receive no government money but earn all their income from their fares. This is par for the course for most cities in the global south.
The coronavirus lock down and the full ban on public transportation in Metro Manila means that all of the drivers, owners, and operators of these vehicles have no income.
Up to 80% of the commuters in Metro Manila travel by public transport. This includes essential workers and medical and emergency personnel. Anything we can do to improve public transportation improves the city for the vast majority of its residents and workers.
What if I told you that we could save the livelihoods of jeepney operators and drivers, provide efficient and free public transportation, enforce social distancing, change driver behavior, AND reform the transportation sector?
The key is to use the economic rescue package to pay operators and drivers to run their routes.
Here’s how we do it:
1. Government should PAY jeepney drivers to run their routes
This would be part of the economic rescue package.
Government pays the equivalent daily income of the bus or jeep. This would not be too expensive relative to the costs of the lock down and the total economic rescue.
Jeepneys account for 40% of all our trips in the mega city. There are 55,000 franchised jeepneys and 5,000 buses in Metro Manila. (Mariano, Patricia. “Modernizing Public Transport in the Philippines” in Changing Transport.)
A jeepney brings in about PhP 4,000 a day, of which the driver takes home PhP 700. The rest goes to the boundary (vehicle rent — which is the operator’s revenue), fuel, and maintenance.
There are about 55,000 jeeps in Metro Manila. The total daily cost of buying jeepney service would be Php 172M. That’s just .05% of the total coronavirus economic stimulus package for the Philippines (PhP 330B).
If we ran the program for 90 days, it would cost PhP 15.5B, or less than 5% of the total stimulus. I think that is well worth the cost of keeping Metro Manila running.
(I do not have income numbers for buses but I’m sure it would be a fraction of the total cost of buying jeepney service.)
Buying the daily routes gives the government leverage to do the following:
2. Make public transportation free
The jeepneys don’t have to charge fares because the government is paying them to run the routes.
The free fares is money back into the pockets of commuters.
3. Effect social distancing rules in public transport by reducing the number of riders
The government can then effectively prescribe limits to ridership, e.g. only 10 people allowed on a jeepney that can carry 18.
The drivers will comply because it doesn’t affect their income.
4. Change driver (and system) behavior
Because we break the passenger = driver income link, drivers will not be swerving in and out of traffic to pickup passengers (and earn fares).
The government can impose performance standards that could include:
- organized stops —we can designate jeepney stops along the routes and require drop offs and pick-ups only in the stops.
- required trip completion times —we can impose an average time to complete a one-way route (depending on the route) and require the drivers to comply.
- safe driving standards — by suspending or barring any driver caught violating road rules. (We can even impose speed limits based trip completion times)
- Set headways and controlled dispatching— we can control the time between jeepneys by defining and imposing head ways at the start of the routes (e.g., depending on demand: 1 jeepney every 3 minutes at peak, 1 jeepney every 5 or 7 minutes off-peak). We can set up dispatches at the either end of the route, they will need it to verify route completion anyway
- Use GPS based-tracking and verification — drivers will be required to check in at the start and end of every route to confirm that they ran the route. It will be easy enough to put together a proximity based phone app and require drivers to upload an app that traces their routes and “clocks” them into the route. Dispatchers with compatible apps can check them in and check them out of the route.
- Get passenger counts —we can require drivers to complete simple forms at the end of each route to give a close estimate of the number of riders they carried. Later on, this system can be digitized and automated so we get more accurate (and daily) origin and destination data.
Setting up the system above sets the stage for better management of our public transportation system and, in the post-COVID-19 world, allows us to:
5. Fully reform public transportation
This pilot will show us that reforming the economics of privately provided public transportation will change the behavior of the system.
We would have changed the incentives that drive the system.
Drivers will drive safer. Trips will be much more predictable. Commuters will save time and money.
We would have changed the way we think about what is possible and open us to new ways of funding transportation. Buying jeepney trips for a whole year, paying the drivers and operators out of government funds, will cost about PhP 65B. That is just 1/100th of the total GDP of Metro Manila (PhP 6 Trillion) and just about 12 days of the supposed economic cost of traffic congestion.
Later on, we can add: more stringent performance standards (including emissions controls) fixed salaries and labor standards; cashless fare collection; electric vehicles.
This is a crisis. This is also an opportunity.
We should seize it.
