WAS YESTERDAY’S nationwide jeepney strike successful? Some drivers’ associations claim that it was successful because it somehow paralyzed commuter mobility. But if we get down to brass tacks, it only succeeded in harming the riding public – not the government, not the oil companies. In fact, aside from the poor commuters, the striking drivers themselves are the victims of their own action.

The clarion call of yesterday’s strike was for government to eliminate the 12% value added tax on oil to cushion price increases. If the President remains deaf to that call, then the strike was a failure!

Judging from past strikes, it could most likely lead to fare increases – a palliative, not a solution. Higher fare means lower value of the peso, thus triggering domino effect in consumer goods. Now, since the workingman gets no corresponding hike in salary, he would minimize his jeepney rides and reduce his budget for food, clothing and other basic needs.

Worse, with higher fares, jeepney operators increase the “boundary” – the fixed rental a driver pays the operator at the end of the day. Remember when the minimum jeepney fare rose from four to seven pesos? It also triggered the rise in jeepney rental from an average of P350 to P500 per day.

Why should this corrupt GMA government even lift a finger to regulate anew the oil industry? If we are suspicious that some power wielders transact with the oil executives under the table, then why expect them to take up the cudgels for us? Not even fools bite the hand that feeds.

Ironically, the solution we seek today – a law to regulate oil prices – was the problem we sought to solve. Under the Fidel Ramos presidency (1992 to1998), the government sold Petron and deregulated the industry on the pretext that new oil players would emerge and compete with the big thee – Shell, Caltex and Petron. Competition, the clowns in Congress argued, would lower gas prices.

Alas, even the new oil players realized the meaning of the quotation, “If you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em.”

It could make us either laugh or cry to realize that transport strikes actually benefit the oil companies. The knee-jerk reaction of any inconvenienced Tom, Dick and Harry, if he can’t afford a car, is to buy his own motorcycle. The more motorcycles there are on the streets, the more money Caltex, Shell and Petron make.

A better alternative would be to do minimize gas consumption. But, on the contrary, the act of taxi and jeepney operators in fielding more units in collusion with the officials of the Land Transportion and Franchising Regulatory Board (LTFRB) triggers bigger demand for gas.

The more units — now more than a thousand taxi cabs in Iloilo — these operators let go, the poorer their drivers become because they compete for the same number of passengers. Ask any taxi driver. They remit a fixed rental of more or less P1,200 per day to the operators, but they would be lucky to earn P200 to P400 for themselves after shelling out another P1,200.00, more or less, for gas.

If the operators were sincere in fighting the oil cartel, they would minimize their units, thus erasing the pitiable scenes of jeepneys running with only one, two or three passengers; and taxi cabs lining up along malls, hotels and restaurants. But these operators don’t give a damn because the boundary system assures them of fixed income.

A jeepney driver plying the Oton-Iloilo City route told me that if he could always keep his jeepney filled to capacity with 18 passengers in at least eight round trips per day, even if such passengers pay only a minimum of seven pesos, he would be grossing P2,016.00 per day. Less P824.40 for 19 liters of diesel (at P43.60 per liter) and P500 for operator’s “boundary”, he has still P691.60 left for himself.

In Bacolod, a few jeepney operators have tried to switch to electric passenger jeepneys that runs on chargeable battery.. This ought to alert the transportation into switching to the same kind.

We won a solar-car race in Australia, but there seems to be no serious effort on the part of government to fund the development of solar technology into mass transport.

And now that coal-fired power plants are emerging in the global scene as sane replacements to expensive diesel-fed power generators, we see some prophets of doom spreading the black propaganda that coal kills! Can’t we see that they are actually tools of the oil cartel? Their unspoken message is to keep on patronizing oil.

Naturally, with no popular alternative to gas, as long as demand rises, prices of the diminishing oil would only skyrocket!

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