Another gaffe

Another day, another gaffe. In what has become a depressingly familiar situation, Malacañang was caught in yet another verbal pickle with President Aquino’s recent pronouncement, seconded unthinkingly by Transportation and Communications Secretary Mar Roxas, that fare increases for the Light Rail Transit and Metro Rail Transit systems are urgently needed now because provincial taxpayers no longer want to subsidize a transport operation that serves only Metro Manila residents and commuters.

“We can use the taxpayers’ money in executing development programs in other regions and provinces instead of merely subsidizing train fares of train passengers in the metropolis,” Roxas said.

The LRT and MRT’s fares were last raised in 2002. The government spends about P7 billion a year to sustain a high-maintenance mass public transport system that runs on artificially depressed ticket prices. Finding a solution to this massive financial hemorrhage had been one of Mr. Aquino’s earliest announced goals at the start of his presidency, but the loud protests that greeted the plan forced the government to defer its implementation. Malacañang has had over a year since then to formulate and fine-tune a communications strategy that would help swing the riding public around to the idea that a reasonable hike in ticket prices is a painful but necessary step if the LRT and MRT services are to survive for the long term.

Surely there is something absurd in a set-up where a train system that offers commuters a faster, cleaner, more efficient and better-maintained means of public transport compared to, say, air-conditioned buses, still have to charge markedly lower rates (P11 for a 10-minute ride on the MRT from Ortigas to Ayala, P15 on a bus that lumbers along for an hour or more on traffic-choked weekdays to cover the same distance), and yet is expected to be in reliably working, if not tip-top, condition year in and year out.

This issue obviously calls for clarity and transparency, for separating fact from misimpression—a job that, if done right, could conceivably make it easier for the metropolis’ residents to accept and adjust to the inevitability of fare readjustments. Instead, what comes across from Mr. Aquino’s seemingly ad-libbed justification for the plan is that Malacañang and its communications team remain at a loss on how to present this dilemma to the public with care and forthrightness. Trotting out a new rationale at this late hour smacks of flailing about, of not knowing the exact goalposts involved in this most delicate proposition.

Worse, the offered excuse only makes matters worse. Now, it has become a distracting argument about the proper redistribution of taxes between Metro Manila and the rest of the country. The League of Provinces of the Philippines has jumped into the fray with the melodramatic plea that “it’s high time the national government took cognizance of the plight of our countrymen outside of Metro Manila,” as LPP president and Mindoro Oriental Gov. Alfonso Umali put it.

“We don’t even have an MRT and LRT in Mindanao,” echoed Davao del Norte Gov. Rodolfo del Rosario, “yet we have to shoulder the burden of the commuters in Metro Manila.”

Set aside the fact that Sen. Ralph Recto appears to have demolished this argument with easily verifiable numbers showing that the bulk of train subsidies does come from the billions of pesos in taxes collected from wealthy cities in Metro Manila such as Makati, Quezon and Caloocan. Why, rather, is this point being raised at all? The taxes collected for the national coffers is for the entire nation’s benefit and disposal. Balkanizing it on the basis of “he who gives more should have more” raises complications the two sides might not want to consider. Whose money is used to build the national roads that improve travel and commerce to and from the countryside, for instance? Or, on the part of the country’s capital, where do the malls and commercial establishments that are its lifeblood get their stocks and resources from, if not from the provinces where fish and livestock are harvested, electric power is generated, products are made?

The government need not muddy the issue with clumsy, ill-considered pretexts. The plain truth is that continuing to subsidize the rail systems at the current levels—P70 billion in the past 10 years, and counting—is not simply viable, rational or beneficial beyond the short-term. Living beyond one’s means is a concept ordinary commuters would—and should—know. That’s the LRT/MRT case in a nutshell.