To what extent have our transport planners lost touch with reality? This question was the big issue in the transport industry a few years ago, and no one can blame the industry for having a lot wrong in the critical area of ​​transport planning. To get to the root of this unpleasant question, let’s start with the seemingly small and insignificant decisions made by our transport managers.

On the day the Metro Manila Busway project was launched, the country’s transportation secretaries announced that the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) would monitor the busway’s functionality. Hundreds of PCG personnel immediately deployed from their stations and substations across the country to man the busway – doing something outside their mandate and performing a task that was not within their maritime jurisdiction.

While these people were being moved from their job at sea to their job in the concrete jungle – the godforsaken task of manning the bus lane – numerous problems arose that fall within the traditional scope of the Coast Guard: sea monsters, oil spills, incursions of all kinds of foreign vessels – especially Chinese ones – into our territorial waters. We do not know how the uncomplaining Coast Guard captains, already hampered by understaffing, were able to perform these numerous tasks while many of their people in the bus lane were doing something they were not trained to do.

The most popular buzzword in world politics right now is “strange,” so it’s only right to ask this question: Wasn’t it strange that the transport mandarins were sending personnel from the understaffed PCG to city jobs amid numerous maritime and sea-life-saving problems?

The traffic managers, based on textbook traffic planning, can get support from the Highway Patrol Group, Metropolitan Manila Development Authority, Metro Manila Council, local government units in Metro Manila, and other land-based and land-oriented agencies. Hiring PCG personnel for the bus lane was both impossible and illogical. It was also difficult to explain even if the PCG is under the administrative jurisdiction of the Department of Transportation (DoTr).

Did the DoT officials even try to read the PCG’s maritime mandate at a very critical time when the Coast Guard had to deploy all its personnel to sea-oriented duty? In an archipelagic state with a borderless maritime area and a long history of serious maritime accidents and oil spills?

Now let’s get to the part about how seriously out of touch with reality our traffic planners are, the really crazy part.

There is a single universal truth about ensuring mobility, which is considered a sacred and inviolable transport policy in all modern and highly developed democracies. It consists in giving priority to mass road transport and complementing it with a complementary policy that restricts cars and other private vehicles.

I never tire of giving this example: Singapore, which is considered the most intelligent country in Asia, gives priority to public buses over, say, the Prime Minister’s convoy. And whoever that is, the Prime Minister agrees to this policy.

The Philippines is an outlier in this regard. We are probably the only densely populated country in the world that has a car-centric policy. This policy has a side policy that makes it a truly global outlier: it restricts mass transportation. This restriction has two effects.

EDSA, the main artery of Metro Manila, restricts city buses to a single, dedicated lane with dedicated boarding and alighting points. In many places near the boarding and alighting areas, there is heavy bus traffic. And the buses stay in that lane no matter what. Otherwise… there is no room for flexibility. The situation is different on the streets of major cities in densely populated countries, where buses are kings of the road and can be used without restrictions. In a way, commuters are co-kings because of their unrestricted mobility.

Provincial buses are treated even more shabbily by the transportation policy. Many do not know that only a court ruling allows these buses to access their terminals, which are mostly located in Cubao, Quezon City. Since the policy prohibits them from using EDSA because cars have priority—an inexplicable policy given their status as mass transportation—provincial buses must use secondary roads to reach their terminals in Cubao. Even more bizarre: To obtain concessions to operate between the National Capital Region and the provinces, provincial bus companies must have sizable Metro Manila terminals. But they are not allowed to access these terminals, which are mostly located on EDSA, via EDSA. Only a country with a tortured transportation policy can inflict such damage on public buses, which, in the absence of an efficient rail system, are the only reliable means of mass transportation in Luzon.

According to news reports, 22 senators had called for the suspension of the Philippine Transport Modernization Program (PTMP), which was formerly the hated Philippine Utility Vehicle Modernization Program. This program focuses on the modernization of the jeepneys, which has two key elements. The jeepney drivers and operators should be part of a transport collective – either a cooperative or a corporation. Then they should scrap the jeepneys in favor of modern vehicles that do not look like the popular jeepneys. The government provides financial support to the cooperatives and corporations, but not enough and beyond the solvency of the jeepney cooperatives and corporations.

The senators said 19 percent of jeepney drivers and operators failed to meet the conditions of the PTMP and were fired, hence the call for a suspension of the program’s implementation and a more thorough review.

Senators should not only push for a review of the jeepney modernization program, but a review of the government’s entire land transport policies, which are global exceptions, bizarre and disjointed at best, and severely hamper our mobility ambitions.