The Unlawyer

More and more Metro Manila motorists are ditching their cars because of high gas prices and are choosing to ride Metro Manila’s mass transit systems to and from work several times a week, if not every day altogether, overloading its three rail lines: Inflation chokes public transport in Philippine capital.

“The Philippines has ambitious plans to extend suburban train services in Manila, eventually covering much of the city, but that will take years and cost billions of dollars. Meanwhile, the surge in demand for trains is worrying transport officials.

“”The problem is that we can only take so much,” said Roberto Lastimoso, a senior MRT [Metro Rail Transit] official. “We have told the economic managers that our situation is becoming critical. It is an issue of national concern.

“”At peak times it’s so uncomfortable, passengers are jostling one another, passengers overflow at street level. You have to deal with jostling by other passengers and the smell of people.”"

Mr. Lastimoso said that his MRT network [Also known as Line 3 - Ed.] now takes on 530,000 passengers a day, a 60 percent increase, and he fully expects ridership to break the million-passenger mark very, very soon.

It isn’t Mr. Lastimoso’s fault that he is in charge of a rail system that I think was inadequate in the first place. I don’t understand what possessed the MRT’s designers to build a light rail system straddling a route that is Metro Manila’s principal north-south thoroughfare, when a heavy urban rail line, with its accompanying infrastructure, should have been constructed in the first place.

So far he is doing the best he can to alleviate a bad situation: instructing the line to operate longer hours, reducing the headway between trains, ordering more trains into service. He also wants to buy more coaches, although the Wikipedia article on the MRT says that the city of Vienna in Austria will donate several used vehicles from its own U-bahn system.

Just take a look at the pictures of the Ayala and Taft MRT station platforms pictured above. These areas could become very crowded during the morning and evening rush hour, even before the line experienced its current surge in ridership.

Here’s a picture of what the inside of a MRT 3 coach looks like. It can get to be pretty crowded during rush hour.

The LRT 2, on the other hand, deploys heavy rail coaches like the one in the picture above, which translates to more passengers being transported per trip.

I suppose some Filipino motorists are immune to high fuel prices. The Manila Standard Today says SUV sales up amid soaring pump prices.

“Sales of the Mitsubishi Pajero, with an engine displacement of 3.8 liters for gasoline or 3.2 liters for diesel, rose 62.7 percent year-on-year in the first half of 2008, with 332 units sold, giving it a leading 36.1 percent share of the market segment.”

I’m amazed that the Mitsubishi Pajero still continues to fascinate Philippine motorists since it was introduced here in 1987 with a normally-aspirated [Turbocharged in later models - Ed.] four-cylinder 4D56 diesel engine. Together with the Nissan Patrol, it belonged to a first wave of vehicles that was sold to a car-hungry populace during the immediate post-Marcos era and managed to snag the 4X4 niche that was the preserve of the Toyota Land Cruiser. It was certainly more luxurious than its competitors, with an interior appointed fairly much like a passenger car.

Elsewhere, Philippine oil companies rolled back the price of gasoline by PHP 1 per liter the other day because of lower world crude oil prices. One Philippine gas station executive was heard on DZBB radio saying that the real reason behind it is because of falling demand for fuel, and the price cut was meant to stimulate it. Friday’s Business Mirror editorial was quick to see the real deal behind this “magnanimous” act:

“The truth is that there was nothing altruistic about shaving 100 centavos from the price of gasoline. The truth is that the oil companies—both the local distributors and the international majors—are beginning to experience the inevitable backlash of their corporate cupidity.”

In retailing, enterprising thieves in the United States have discovered ways to fool and ultimately steal from supermarkets that use self-service check out lanes: Hacking The Grocery Store Self-Checkout: 3 Ways Thieves Are Making YOU Pay For What They Don’t. Here’s just one M.O. favored by these crooks:

“With produce and expensive cuts of meat such as steak and beef, they can be entered manually if their tag is missing or it won’t scan for one reason or another. When entering in the item code, you can enter in the code for a cheaper item, or a smaller item. As long as the item is scanned, the weight is mostly irrelevant. Expensive cuts of lean steak can be ringed in as a quarter pound of ground beef. Something jumbo sized can be entered as something a fraction as big. If the item looks like the item being scanned, brand, weight, or size is often ignored altogether.”

Philippine supermarkets have yet to adopt self-service check out lanes, but I find it difficult to imagine them keeping their guard down in the same manner described in the blog entry I linked to above. Philippine supermarkets tend to be more conscious against retail theft in order to preserve razor-thin margins. For example, one major Philippine supermarket chain mounts surveillance cameras on top of every check-out lane and cashier station. On top of that, security guards mount patrols outside the check out lanes, not only to deter employee theft but also to prevent outside thieves from carting off the customers’ grocery bags.

I’ve mentioned it before: infant formula ranks as the number one item stolen from Philippine supermarket shelves. This problem must have been very acute for at least one eastern Metro Manila supermarket that it has taken to displaying and selling all of its baby milk products in a special enclosure inside the premises, complete with its own check out counter.