IN 1988, the English alternative rock band The Godfathers released a song on what they opined were four constant stages in life: “Birth, School, Work, Death.”
About a decade later, weary residents of Metro Manila and other key cities in the Philippines were starting to contend with a creeping phenomenon every waking and working day of their lives: terrible, exasperating (and even life-threatening) traffic.
Experts say it’s the curse of a developing country such as the Philippines. It has become an epidemic of monumental proportions. The scourge of metropolitan urbanites and, lately, their neighbors from nearby provinces, have earned worldwide notoriety as “the worst kind on the planet,” according to Waze. This paper has constantly reported about the price tag on the everyday economic losses brought about by this daily debacle: P2.4 billion in 2012, P3.5 billion in 2018 and P5.4 billion in 2035. In Cebu City, it’s a staggering P1.1 billion.
This problem in Metro mobility is being addressed head-on by Angkas, the very first app-based motorcycle ride-hailing service in the Philippines. Its CEO, Angeline Tham, believes that her company has what it takes to bring Pinoys from point A to point B more efficiently.
Reeling from a major setback a few months ago from the Department of Transportation with a total ban from our thoroughfares, Angkas’s service has now earned the nod by no less than the Philippine Senate. Legislators have vowed to help legalize the ride-sharing bikes-for-hire and other similar services, with the aim to bring a solution to the motoring mess enveloping Edsa and elsewhere in Manila, as well as downtown Cebu.
Angkas endeavors to rewrite a different tune in the cadence of transportation around the Metro and major cities, with high hopes that it will not take a lifetime for our traffic blues to make a significant turnaround. Here’s what its CEO had to say:
ENVOYS&EXPATS: Tell us how you found your way to the Philippines.
THAM: I grew up in Singapore, where I launched one of the top online-auction outfits in Singapore called Sold.sg. That business brought me to the Philippines, and I fell in love with the people and culture.
After I sold the company, I started spending more time in this country, learning more about the things that makes it so special. At the same time, I also saw opportunities on how things could be done better. That’s what eventually led me to start Angkas.
Please share with our readers your inspiration behind Angkas.
The Philippines loses billions of pesos every day because of productivity lost from what seems to be insurmountable traffic. Angkas was created to make the lives of millions of Filipinos everywhere a little bit easier by allowing them to get to their destinations in half the time and half the cost.
From my time here, I’ve seen how debilitating traffic can be for commuters. While we can quantify fairly well the economic cost of traffic, the complete and mostly intangible costs of traffic in our everyday lives and decisions is quite immeasurable: Think, for example, about unattended school days or classes, or unsuccessful job applications, due to length of distance. Or, how certain relationships in life are strained or don’t prosper due to the difficulty of meeting in person.
As a Singaporean who has traveled and lived in both developed and developing countries, I’ve seen the juxtapositions and realized how crucial reliable public transport is to empowering people. So when I moved to Manila and suffered its world-famous congestion, I was spurred even more to give people a faster, more reliable alternative.
If you look across Southeast Asia, the Philippines is unique in its love for cars as the primary mode of transportation. In Indonesia, Vietnam and Thailand—developing countries with still nascent mass-transit systems—all of them rely on motorcycles to get people around. Upon discovering that motorcycles were, in fact, gaining popularity in the country, albeit in the private sector only, and knowing ride hailing was no longer novel to Filipinos, it made perfect sense to apply the technology to the more agile motorcycle.
So far, how has Angkas performed vis-à-vis its original vision? Has the outcome been as initially planned?
We started with a simple goal: to help commuters get through traffic safely and reliably. Though we’ve been through quite a lot in the journey, we’ve always stayed true to this vision.
Our dedication to the onboarding process, training, professional conduct and 24/7 support is what has made us successful. It has taken a very passionate team and years of continuous improvement to get us to where we are today.
An unexpected outcome was the positive impact we’ve been able to bring to our hardworking biker-partners. They have also been with us through this journey to prove that motorcycles can be used responsibly. Through the Angkas platform, we are now able to educate many Filipino motorcyclists about road safety, especially when access to such training is severely lacking in the country.
Though informal motorcycle taxis, or habal-habal, has been around for more than 40 years now, these were never widely adopted in the dense urban settings where congestion is worst.
When Angkas first came out, we were a novelty used mainly by very early adopters, adventurous types, and those whose jobs depended on being on time. Think of business-process outsourcing employees with strict shifts. Due to the stigma against motorcycles, it took us a long time to build trust, mostly through education campaigns and lots of word-of-mouth, despite the obvious savings in costs and travel time.
Since then, Angkas has evolved into somewhat of an accidental cultural icon—at least, our Twitter account is—and has become a crucial part of commuters’ daily lives. To date, we have gotten over 3 million downloads for our app, and over 27,000 biker-partners in the two regions we serve: Metro Manila and Metro Cebu.
Your thoughts on how Angkas is addressing the traffic situation and commuting woes in the country’s key cities.
Motorcycles are the only vehicles that can get through heavy traffic easily. This is how we help commuters beat it. If we used four-wheeled vehicles in our service, commuters would still have to bear with the daily gridlocks, and the purpose of the service would be defeated.
Angkas provides commuters with a convenient, fast, and affordable way to go to their destinations, while providing biker-partners a decent means of livelihood.
More important, we give time and power back to the people. With Angkas, you can get to work on time. You can now spend more time with your loved ones. And you can now choose to make decisions without being shackled to traffic.
Do you think Angkas has been accepted this time by society, the motoring community and the Filipino public, despite the past challenges it faced with Philippine authorities?
Use of motorcycles has always been stigmatized and is seen as unsafe. Through our experience, it is because most do not have the opportunity to learn how to ride safely.
We have been able to successfully professionalize the habal-habal service through technology on our platform. Education, attitude and continuous improvement are the keys. We have shown that we can make them safe, as long as bikers adhere to what they have learned during our stringent training process.
When we started, we had many skeptics and outright critics of our service. Fortunately, we have been able to win over different groups of people one step at a time. Our commitment to provide a safe and reliable service, along with friendly professional bikers and our bold marketing, really helped endear the public to us.
I’ve had friends before who didn’t want to be associated with riding a motorcycle. Even some of our hardcore fans were reluctant to be super vocal about their great experience on Angkas. We saw that change with time as we consistently provided a service that helped solve a need.
I believe the reason we have grown to where we are today, is because we positioned our services at the core of what we do. On top of the convenience provided by ride-hailing apps, Angkas gives users the option to get to their destinations in half the time and half the cost. The experience can be very liberating.
While there are many people today who cannot live without Angkas, our journey is still ongoing, and we hope to be able to empower more Filipinos by helping them beat the traffic.
How is training conducted with your drivers? Do they have time for such, considering the high demand for the service?
Safety is Angkas’s priority. As such, we ensure that all our biker-partners are fully trained and qualified before they are given the go-signal to start serving their passengers. To ensure the best quality bikers are on the platform, only 30 percent of our applicants pass our onboarding process.
Our safety training features different modules that address the needs of the bikers and their passengers on the road: safety tips, road regulations, proper behavior, actual riding procedures and written tests.
We are continually improving this process to maintain our 99.997-percent safety record not just through our onboarding, but also through strict monitoring of their performance on the app.
Are you a motorcycle rider yourself? How do you find navigating around Metro Manila?
I actually enjoy using Angkas more as it is relaxing and more convenient. It also gives me a chance to learn more about the customer experience and chat with our bikers.
A lot would agree that Angkas has a very fun and witty social- media team.
It is composed of young and fun-loving folks with an incredible sense of humor. They come from the same demographic as most of our main users: millennials and Generation Z, so the relatable content came naturally.
Nothing there was ever company-mandated: We gave the team some freedom to experiment and, over time, they naturally found this voice that we’ve settled on as Angkas’s social-media persona.
Other than ensuring nothing breaks our own rules regarding user safety, the team has earned my trust regarding content and is free to be as creative and irreverent as they need to be.
What is your leadership style? How do you lead a company in a foreign land?
I’ve learned a lot from my team on the local culture and way of doing business. I’m blessed that Angkas has a very passionate and strong team working together to achieve our goal of giving commuters a safe and reliable motorcycle taxi-service platform. This helps me get through all the low points in running the business.
What does the future look like/hold for Angkas?
Since safety is Angkas’s priority, we hope to keep working with every single motorcyclist in the Philippines to help educate them in the proper and safe usage of their bikes. There are currently over 18 million motorcycles in the Philippines, and this number will only keep growing. Without proper training, Filipinos traversing the roads using motorcycles will endanger not only themselves but others, as well.
We also want to destigmatize motorcycles and remove the perception that they are inherently unsafe. We would like Filipinos to see the motorcycle as a legitimate form of public transportation, and we can only do this if we keep doing the work to train our biker-partners on every single safety measure we deem necessary.
If you were an Angkas driver, who would be that “dream” person you’d like to book a ride with you?
I’d love to take Lee Kuan Yew through Manila to give him a tour of the beautiful city and learn from his views on good governance. Though he has visited the Philippine capital many times before, he has never experienced it on a bike.
Image credits: Jimbo Albano, Roy Domingo/Jonathan Enriquez