I haven’t been to Camotes, the birthplace of my parents, for a long while now. So I don’t know if a fastcraft still services the Cebu City to Poro route, or if it does, if its operation is now viable. In the past, fastcraft operations were shortlived. But that was before Camotes’ tourism potentials were fully harnessed.
I remember the heydays of fastcrafts, whose introduction once flourished in routes plied by slow and rickety ships. Their lure was the supposed comfort they introduced in sea travel. Fastcrafts styled their operation like those of commercial airplanes. Until reality bit their owners. Profit is the main motivation of business. Without it, business sinks.
Soon, fastcrafts plying in Cebu City became just like the common mode of transport in the Philippines. During peak months, when the number of passengers rises, comfort got thrown out of the window. Overloading was a practice, the system of assigning seat numbers to passengers jettisoned. Some passengers were forced to stand during the more than two hours of travel.
The past days, I have been a regular passenger of MyBus, which like the fastcrafts of old partly used passenger comfort as among its lure. There is indeed a sense of comfort riding in airconditioned buses with cushioned seats spaced enough for passengers not to feel crowded. All that vanishes during peak hours when the vehicles groan because of overloading. Or when you are among those standing on the cramped spaces between seats and near the doors.
Transport firms cash in on the lack of available mass transportation systems in the country. In this particular instance—I don’t know if they were instructed to do it—bus drivers do not seem to have in mind a passenger load limit, as long as those passengers can still breathe. To be fair, that is also the passenger’s own doing. I rarely see a passenger back off after seeing how crowded the insides of a bus is. We sacrifice just to be able to reach our homes early.
Has this become part of our culture? Passengers of public utility jeepneys (PUJ) even do worse things. With the lack of available space to crowd in, excess PUJ passengers hang on at the back. How many times have we seen PUJs plying the mountain barangay routes loaded with passengers swaying to and fro while seated on the roof?
Habal-habal drivers do worse in the effort to increase profitability by ferrying more passengers than their vehicles could carry. They have passenges bunched on the motorcycle seats while they themselves are on the gasoline tank. It’s a wonder they are atill able to maneuver the motorcycle while climbing up rough roads with steep inclines.
There was a time when the Land Transportation Office (LTO) boasted it would end the practice of “standing” in passenger buses, but only for those plying longer routes. That effectively exempted MyBus and the older firm, KMK, from the ban. Even then, how effectively has the LTO implement such policy? And has the agency looked into the practices of the two bus firms plying the short southern routes?