Long-Distance Buses in the Philippines: the Chaos of Private Enterprise and Government Absence

The rusty old box on wheels "sped along" the Emilio Aguinaldo Highway south of Manila as fast as I could...which, unfortunately for the anxious traveler, was not that much.  Sitting on the long wooden chairs of the long-distance bus, the traveler kept staring out of the glass-less window to see just how long the traffic will continue to crawl forward.  The bus was moving so slowly on the two-lane "national highway" that the wind coming through the open windows cannot compensate for the heat of the early morning sun and the body fumes of the massive crowds squeezed into the already over-capacity bus.

But the two-man team of the bus driver and his ticket-seller simply was not satisfied...and there was no way to satisfy them.  The wooden long-benches enough to sit two normal people are already squeezing three adults and a couple of children each, and the rear half of the bus were already crammed with standing passengers.  Yet, every time the bus passed through a sizable town on the highway, the driver slowed down to a crawl while the ticket seller opened up the front door to start yelling to pedestrians, repeatedly, the half a dozen towns and cities the bus will pass by next in hope of squeezing a few more into the bus.

And people just came on and off the bus like it was some sort of street stalls selling produce.  Every five minutes a new street peddler boarded to sell peanuts, chips, and drinks.  Each would give one of whatever they are selling to the driver and ticket seller and walk down the already tight middle aisle of the bus with their heavy loads on their backs.  And with no announcement of stops and towns whatsoever, people got on and off the buses rapidly, sometimes even without the bus completely coming to a stop.  The number of times the driver stepped on brake probably exceed the times he step on gas by many times.

The sight of the road ahead definitely helped.  Aside from stretches of highways running along the Manila Bay or through empty farmlands, the highway was constantly passing through one town of the other.  And when the highway hits a town, it was no longer a highway; it becomes, instead, the main street of that town.  All the economic activities of the town, from high-end shopping malls, to little shops selling vegetables, everything, from people, to vehicles, to produce and animals, seemed to spill onto the middle of the highway, slowing all traffic to a crawl by clogging it with every sort of obstacle imaginable.

However, what is perhaps much more frustrating than sitting in a bus watching your scheduled bus trip of less than an hour turn into a two-and-half-hour odyssey is, well, finding the right bus in the first place.  A supposed unified long-distance bus station is substituted by a large intersection in the middle of the city where bus depots for different companies exist in all directions.  Buses come in and out of those depots all day and all night long, with their ticket sellers yelling out destinations to the passers-by.  There are no questions to be asked: once the right bus is spotted, you jump in the moving thing, and pay the fare to the ticket seller.

Since no bus schedules are posted (or seem to exist) in any of the bus depots, no passenger seem to be content quietly waiting for the bus to fill up in the depot.  It is much more assuring to head onto the main intersection, where one would sure that whatever moving bus s/he gets onto will already be on the way to the desired destination.  Hundreds of buses coming from and going to every direction, along with thousands of people heading toward every direction create a vast moving transportation marketplace where supply and demand are intersected in matter of one yell and a few seconds.

Does this model work?  Surely it does.  One cannot see any local abandon a planned journey in frustration or intimidation due to the sheer confusion of the whole scene.  And as previously mentioned, any basis for public transportation that can entice a society away from massive private car ownership as it gets richer is fundamentally good from a long-term perspective.  Yet, the scene on and off the bus in the Philippines is an effective illustration of just how public transport can fall into chaos without centralized organization, or at least policy and rules setting, on the part of the government.

Without government restraint and rule of law, private enterprises will do anything to make as much profit as possible.  In the sphere of transport, that somehow gets translated into a collusive behavior of all companies to utterly disregard quality (structural procedure, comfort, speed, on-time rate, and not to mention safety) of any service.  An authority must be placed on top of their private bus companies to rein in their freewheeling nature, and channel their entrepreneurial spirit into developing a much more convenient and easily used system that can be scaled and improved over time...