Philippine Car Reg Legislation

Who’s in charge? This is a valid question that many Metro Manila commuters asked last Monday morning when they found themselves stranded on their way to schools and offices. It coincided with the start of the test-run of number coding for all public utility buses (PUBs) in EDSA.

Under the present setup, government agencies involved in public transport are the Land Transportation Office (LTO) and the Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board (LTFRB), both attached agencies of the Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC), and the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA).

With the alphabet soup of these acronyms of government transport agencies, last Monday’s paralyzing bus strike greeted the return to Manila of President Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III from his trip to Japan where he attended the just concluded Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Leaders’ Summit.

Organized bus operators and drivers groups staged their transport strike to vehemently oppose the MMDA’s inclusion of PUBs in the number coding. Provincial and city buses were previously exempted from the number coding scheme because they are the major means of mass transport.

Public utility buses were covered by the Unified Vehicular Volume Reduction Program (UVVRP) until 2004. When the Aquino administration took over, this new “number coding” system was devised by MMDA chairman Francis Tolentino. He described it as one of the “creative ways to solve our traffic woes.”

The MMDA chairman cited a study by the University of the Philippines-National Center for Transportation Studies that came out with disturbing findings. Even under the existing UVVRP, private lanes on EDSA had breached their maximum carrying capacity, the study concluded.