Sunstar Essay: The woman driving

Saturday, October 15, 2011

I WAS going out of the gate of my boarding house during college days to open it to a friend who was backing up to park her car closer to the side along Dominga St. in Pasay City. Then I heard the crash.

Half an hour later, after my friend talked peace with my neighbor whose car she just hit and to whom the cost of repair of the dent she promised to pay, we sat quietly in the sala. After a few more minutes of silence, I said, “You were trying to park…Didn’t you see, it was right behind your car!”

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“I know. I saw it in the rearview mirror. I also actually looked back and saw it, but I was thinking of the problems in the office…I didn’t see it although I saw it…” she sighed.

In another time in a ride home more recently, when the cabbie tried to get away from the car ahead of us because it was too slow and couldn’t decide which path to take, he said, “Babaye gyud nang ga-drive, pusta ka, Ma’m?”

I bet there are a lot of write-ups in the internet about women drivers as “sub-species.” The woman is “scratching, swearing, biting, hair-pulling, nagging” in anything she does, so it’s said. Imagine her driving!

But the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA) has trained the first batches of women public drivers, this one to try to see if women are more careful on the road, more caring, perhaps less daring and scarcely foolhardy. MMDA has incentives for bus firms hiring women drivers, such as exemption from the number-coding scheme for women-driven buses. This in the face of an increase in accidents in Metro Manila, if not in other areas in the country, mostly from reckless driving by men.

MMDA cites studies of women drivers being less aggressive while driving. MMDA 2010 figures show 9,526 male drivers seriously injured in road accidents; the females, 3,605. Those killed were 260 male and 60 female.

One of those who finished the professional driving training is a former starlet, Alma Arcega, who at 38 has come back from Canada (where she did driving jobs in a country where women bus drivers are common). “Women drivers are defensive drivers,” she says.

Although there are no reports yet on how the scheme is working, MMDA is positive about the sense of safe driving among women, that women are not assertive behind the wheel, are more law-abiding and do care for the condition of the vehicle.

In the first part of the year, 10 women were trained as the first ones who now ply the streets in Manila. These women were hired by HMT Transport Bus Co., Philtranco and RRCG Transport Systems Group. Such development has been pushed as one of the solutions to the problem of the rising rate of traffic accidents in a year, says MMDA.

In New Delhi, India is where an outreach organization also trains women as public drivers, in search of “livelihood with dignity” for young women in poor communities to give the woman the right to “mobility with security.”

Even as we in the Philippines encourage public transport driving for women to minimize a rise in traffic accidents, India is going into it for more reasons, to shake off the gender myth and stereotypes about women and what they cannot do. The people behind the project would build new role models in India for women, as private women chauffeurs and taxi drivers.

What’s interesting in the Delhi women drivers’ project is that the two-month long training for the women includes learning karate for self-defense in the harrowing streets of New Delhi. The company hiring women drivers who come from the slum areas is also a transport only for women, each unit connected in a new radio cab service. The woman owner of the company, Revathi Roy, has connected all cab units through the radio system to a call center, also with panic buttons for driver and passengers.

While the training of women drivers is Metro Manila’s way to reduce instances of traffic accidents and in New Delhi to reduce crime against women travelers in dark streets, both efforts are actually also to give women trust in what they can do.

(ecuizon@gmail.com)