The cramped beep (portmanteau of bus and jeep) of Metro Cebu will be a typical setting of disease transmission when the flu or any airborne malady circulates en masse.
This will not be surprising.
I ride the beep now and then. Its probably longest routes take the passenger inland from the coastal City of Naga in the province’s south to Cebu City’s IT Park and back, and from the Tintay terminal in the city’s north to its downtown waterfront and vice versa.
The other day, after going to Naga in the hope of swimming in its Olympic-size pool but finding that it had no water, I made my way back to Cebu City in a beep, stepping off at the Cebu Normal University stop for a swim at the sports center across from the street.
It is great that in a beep, one may go with some ease through Metro Cebu with fewer changes of vehicles. One, however, cannot overstate how badly public transportation here needs to improve.
The beep, its aisle quite narrow even for one passenger, was not made to be jam packed. But overload it, drivers and conductors do. The unfortunate commuter loses time if she or he waits for a less crowded ride, which is hard to come by, so she or he begrudgingly endures sitting or standing inside, squished together with fellow passengers until the end of a trip.
Not a decade has passed since the coronavirus pandemic. Yet life in a beep shows how little we value air circulation for public health. As passengers, we not only arrange ourselves like swine thrown together in a butcher’s truck, but we also do not have the ventilation the pigs enjoy. Behind closed, airconditioned doors, we breathe one another’s breaths.
With all its openings, the jeep, in fact, has better ventilation, (ah, for better air quality in the metro), not to mention better seating affordances than the beep. Passengers are rarely constrained to sit or stand in the aisle in a jeep.
One must concede, on the other hand, that things get tight again when the “jeep” is that shrunken version we call the multicab, where passengers wiggle through people’s knees left and right (imagine an aisle where the knees of the seated kiss) to get to and from their seats.
But we obviously just carried over from the heydays of the jeep our bad beep habits, come to think of it. Conductors are no endangered species, I bet, who would still try to squeeze 36 into a jeep that has room for only 24 people.
Traffic enforcers have tried to end the malpractice of public transport overloading. Alas, beep drivers, conductors and even passengers frequently conspire to break the rules and evade responsibility.
Once, while commuting, I overheard a driver and conductor consult each other on whether they should overload their beep as if to do so were the most natural thing to do.
I have also heard a beep conductor wonder why traffic enforcers were out keeping watch over public transport loading at dinner time, failing to leave drivers to do whatever at the usual hours.
One busy afternoon, as the packed beep I rode wound its way through Duterte St. in Barangay Guadalupe, the driver noticed up ahead an enforcer monitoring traffic. In response, he ordered all standing passengers to duck. They did, staying hidden from the enforcer while the vehicle was in his line of sight.
Drivers not only stress and endanger their passengers by overloading their beeps. At times, they also amplify their disregard for order when they auto-reroute, often suddenly, and often swerving or accelerating without warning, to escape traffic enforcers.
One evening last year, the driver of yet another ultimately stuffed beep that I rode took a detour to sneak past enforcers. Instead of passing through the closely watched Osmeña Blvd. and turning right on P. Del Rosario St., he went through the two Urgello streets, turned right on Alcantara St., left on V. Rama Ave. and left on N. Bacalso Ave. to go down south.
Just last Sunday, Sept. 28, 2025, heading home at night from Colon St. after the burial in Liloan of one of my aunties (Mathea Matondo Baguia — may she rest in peace), I boarded a beep bound for Naga since my stop was on the route.
However, a man — dispatcher or conductor, I am unsure — accosted me to ask where I wanted to go. When he learned that I was bound for Barangay Bulacao in Cebu City, he told me to go to the next vehicle that he was supposedly pointing to (but was nowhere to be seen), to get to my destination, as the beep I was in (with plate number GBD 6376), only admitted Naga-bound passengers.
That explained in part the crowd of south-bound commuters at hand, who would not board the next beep that was — drumroll — overloaded.
When drivers, conductors, and dispatchers regularly subject the riding public to cavalier treatment, and enforcers are inconsistent or ineffective on the job, commuters just tune out and accept their lot or endure until they can take out a loan to buy their own private vehicle.
That, of course, also raises the concentration of vehicles, worsening traffic in our streets. And that increases our carbon footprint: Perfectly discouraging at this time when we ought to be pulling all the stops to deal with the climate emergency.
I wonder whether the Bus Rapid Transit system will significantly change commuting in Metro Cebu. I will not be surprised if it will just scale up the systemic and behavioral riding problems that most meet with resignation and against which, even today, local governments prove themselves impotent.