it shouldn’t matter whether the car is parked most of the time or not. – Cocoy

Why doesn’t it matter? Encouraging people to minimize use of their cars and take public transport (or at least car pool) would be beneficial to both traffic flow and the environment.

the cost to charge per use would only create a whole level of bureaucracy. – Cocoy

Not if you automate the system. In Singapore, they have set-up ‘gantries’ (electronic toll booths) which automatically deduct prepaid cards if a vehicle passes under it. They’re currently working on a system that works via GPS. Besides a ‘bureaucracy’ is not intrinsically evil. It’s a means by which people and processes are organized to perform a certain function. Even the private sector has bureaucracies.

However, let me digress a little bit and say that the reason why there’s a clamor regulation of the oil industry is the charge that oil companies are abusing deregulation by overcharging us.

i submit that the mere fact that government and the public insist that oil companies change prices whenever it goes up or down is a sign of intervention, in spite of the law. i further submit that this is simply bad business for the smaller oil players. instead of having a differentiation of several pesos— you’ll only be different by several centavos, if at all.

if the big three charges too high— go buy somewhere else. no one is forcing anybody to just buy from petron, shell or caltex. let the market differentiate itself. more importantly let the smaller oil players find that niche. i further submit that if the small players give bad service— maybe the higher prices of the big three can be justifiable.

Patricio, right now, in spite of the law it really isn’t a deregulated market at all.

Yeah, I agree that innovation could work and would probably be better if we allow private enterprise to control public transportation.

However, let me digress a little bit and say that the reason why there’s a clamor regulation of the oil industry is the charge that oil companies are abusing deregulation by overcharging us.

benign0, there is already an alterantive to the jeepney using Toyota’s Asian Utility Vehicle, the FX.

As i mentioned to my reply to cvj earlier, in any other place i would agree with you that it is a utility. but the way public transportation in the philippines is setup— it only creates a whole class of coolies.

there is injustice happening in the streets of the Philippines.

You see, the driver comes out of the deal as renting out the jeep, the bus, the taxi and the fx (and i think also the tricycle) from the owner/operator of the vehicle. The driver doesn’t earn anything if he can not pay his operator “rent”. He doesn’t get a salary. The way the industry is structured, there is a fixed payment. The payment is the same whether or not your vehicle is efficient. It already *is* a business— one that is highly regulated because the argument is, such regulation is “good” for the greater number of people.

my argument is that the present setup doesn’t help first, the consumer— because there is no choice whatsoever. a broken down jeep charges the same as a new one. a broken down bus charges the same as a new one. etc. second, the system. The consumer doesn’t enjoy the variability when prices of crude oil drop— they only suffer the indignity of paying more when oil goes up.

Second, the drivers are not paid a decent living wage. they don’t have a wage to speak off. Drivers are aggressive on the road, creating MORE chaos in the street. they are aggressive because they need to make their daily payment to their operator AND earn a living. There are no discounts, no differentiation between one jeep’s service over another. a broken down jeep charges the same as a new one.

Government has “outsourced” transportation to the private sector.

I would agree with you that the best and tried and tested way is for a state owned public transport system. in fact i’d wager that you can impose a business tax to make it free. in an ideal scenario it would be done in a per city basis.

in metro manila, ideally it could be controlled by the Metro Manila Development Authority but to do so in the current structure of Metro Manila would be near impossible.

I strongly believe that to deregulate the market, to take the giant leap would create better entrepreneurs of our drivers. It gives them human dignity by vying for a living wage. it gives them better opportunities to innovate and may even get other investors to look at this transportation sector as a viable business. deregulation also creates the opportunity for the consumer to choose and to enjoy different payment strategies.

To deregulate them any further will make worse an already bad situation. Their willy-nilly operating model defies every effort to systematise public transport.

I don’t think public transport is meant to be a free enterprise operation in a modern society. It is a piece of infrastructure that should be a basic service of the state — more a utility than a competitive business and a part of the underlying structures that provides the grease for the free market that runs on top of it.

BTW, Monetarism as a concept has a specific meaning and it does not encompass Friedman’s larger ideology.

I also shared Friedman’s view about ‘Capitalism and Freedom’ twenty years ago.

Well, Friedman’s dogma is monetarism. i share his view that in a free market, one should limit government’s role to attain political and social freedom. heheh.

BTW, if you believe that government has a role in ensuring safety (as opposed to letting the market perform that role), then that would be a deviation from Milton Friedman’s dogma, which to me is a good start. (That’s a journey i started two decades ago.)