The Senate hearing the other day wanted a traffic master plan instead of emergency powers. While this debate continues, news of people dying on the road due to the horrific congestion have cropped up. It seems that at this point, policymakers still do not know what to do to solve the travails that millions of people, not only in Metro Manila, suffer every day. The economic losses, not to forget the emotional, health and relational aspects, are now staggering. We know the costs but the solutions at hand seem to be too far at resolving it.
I will not add to the debate. But what is clear is that a disaster needs a fast and a relieving response. Unfortunately, even if we fire on all cylinders, there is no solution that is fast and will give immediate relief. The mechanisms to attract people support are all too punitive and instead of people following, we tend to go around the law and the ordinances. Since we are looking for violators, then, we are unable to really solve the problem—only those that contribute to the problem.
Along this line, we may need to revisit the incentives that surround traffic flow. Let us consider two aspects of the many facets of traffic flow, i.e., public transportation and enforcement. First, public transportation is clearly a public good. If we are able to move people faster at lower cost, then we could lower the reason for private ownership of vehicles. There are two elements that are present in public transportation—how it is organized and the incentives that it provides. Many of our public services have a significant if not overwhelming presence of the private sector. Public transportation is not an exception. With too many small operators of tricycles, jeepneys and buses plying the Metros around the country, you will need a strong regulator to efficiently manage this system. Adding to this woe is the fact that the incentive mechanism for profit making in this small operator system is the “boundary system.” The system operates like a daily rental where the driver pays the operator and keeps the rest as his share. Since the fare is per passenger, it forces the driver to fill up his vehicle all the time. Thus, for the driver, his opportunity cost is not time-based, but per passenger. So, as long as there is an empty seat or space for passenger, the behavior of the driver is to stop. We have seen the effect of this behavior. The public in general, however, has opportunity cost based on time. So the employee, the student, the logistics system and the rest cannot wait until the driver fills up the vehicle. The Department of Labor and Employment already issued an order that bus drivers should be paid a salary and not implement the boundary system—but that cannot work if the system is run privately. Therefore, an important but expensive short-term solution is for government to take over public transportation operations similar to many metropolitan centers around the world. Public transportation is a scale industry. Government can start operations of major routes first. It eventually can bid out monopoly rights to operate these routes. We should start thinking this way!
The second aspect of traffic flow is enforcement. Again, the incentive mechanisms that are present in this is severely flawed. Every enforcer, whether Metropolitan Manila Development Authority or city, is given the incentive to catch as many violators as possible because they will get commissions out of it. This is always prone to corruption because there is discretion for the enforcer to issue whatever violation it can think of to get that commission. In addition, this is why very few of the enforcers are really manning traffic but are looking for violators (consider where they usually post themselves). To solve this, the government should shift the incentive structure from commissions in the violations to bonuses from improved traffic flow. For instance, if the average speed of the assigned area to a group of enforcers is 20 kph and after a month it improved to 25 kph, there is a 25-percent improvement in traffic flow—so the city concerned can give a 25-percent bonus salary for that month, and so on. This is a bit tedious but once enforcers are shifted from being focused on commissions to bonuses, then they will work for this. Since the MMDA already identified 300 chokepoints in Metro Manila, the improvement of these chokepoints can be the starting point as baseline for assessing future bonus. The cities in Metro Manila and other parts of the country will need to establish the baseline speed and get the support of citizens organizations to make this work.
All told, these are not instant solutions but they can very well change the behavior of significant actors in the traffic flow and using the power of correct incentives, we will hopefully get a glimpse of a solution in the horizon.