The idea for today’s column came the other day when I was listening to an American talk show where one of the hosts mentioned a news item about a 19-year-old man being convicted for violating a city anti-noise ordinance by driving down a street with his truck’s windows rolled down while his stereo blared out rap music. The judge gave him a choice: pay a $100 fine or listen to four hours of polka music.

For those unfamiliar with polka music, it has a beat that entertains some people (some local NGOs like to play the “chicken polka” as an energizer, between boring lectures) but drives others, the young especially, insane. Our 19-year-old rap junkie did choose to listen to the polka music, maybe because he couldn’t afford to pay $100.

Intrigued I went to the Internet and found that there had been other similar convictions. My favorite case involves a 24-year-old man, also convicted for disturbing the public peace with rap music on his car stereo and asked to choose between a $150 fine and listening to 20 hours of classical symphonic music. He chose to face the symphonies, but lasted only 15 minutes.

These news tidbits reminded me of the many complaints I get from friends about how they are assaulted, almost daily, by what jeepney drivers think is music, but which passengers usually consider to be noise.

The noise pollution inside jeepneys has become really bad in recent years because there are all these cheap computer CD players that have been discarded and are resold to jeepney drivers for less than P1,000 each. Wired to speakers, the atrocious output from the CD players should be used by American — and Filipino — judges to punish noise violators (although I wonder if it would matter to jeepney drivers).

The noise assault is only the latest addition to the many problems people face with the jeepney or, in Filipino, the “dyip.” For millions of Filipinos, the jeepney is the main transportation mode, in good times and bad, for daily commuting or for emergencies. I know someone named after the jeepney; his legal name is Jiffy, which he got because he was born in a jeepney.

Many first-time visitors to the Philippines are intrigued by the “dyip,” beguiled by the photographs they see in guidebooks and tourism brochures showing our colorful jeepneys with cheerful and courteous drivers. Many of them know about the history of the jeepneys, descended from American Jeeps left by the military.

If these visitors are lucky, they get to ride one of those made-for-tourists jeeps, inside a resort for example, which can be charming. But if they take one of the regular jeepneys plying one of our city streets, or a rural road, one ride is enough to make them change their minds. “Never again, please,” they beg.

Jeep, dyip or jeepney, these vehicles are iconic for the Filipino, but our feelings for this icon are a mixture of love and hate, repulsion and fascination.

Folk art

When I was in college, I was given a reading assignment that treated the jeepney as folk art. It was well written, and I agree totally that the jeepney is folk art, and says a lot about the Philippines and Filipinos. That particular article, written I think back in the 1960s, talked about how the jeepney reflects our love of riotous colors, and our fear of empty space, which is why every inch of the jeepneys’ exterior (and sometimes, interior) is painted or decorated.

Some of the folk art jeeps still run on our streets, and do provide material for student term papers. Many proclaim themselves to be “katas ng Saudi,” or some other place overseas, meaning they were bought with the blood, sweat and tears of overseas Filipino workers. The “paintings” are still an intriguing mix of images waiting to be analyzed as a reflection of Filipino culture: saints and pin-up girls, children (the jeepney owners’, I presume) and assorted flora and fauna, Japanese animé characters and Obama bin Laden.

But folk art was about the only positive aspect of the jeepney. I use “was” because even the colorful folk artsy jeeps are disappearing. Most of the ones we see today are drab and gray, and the interiors are dirty, carrying the accumulated odors of diesel fumes, cigarette smoke and human sweat.

Even in the days of the artsy “dyip,” these vehicles were already acquiring a rather unsavory reputation. When I was still in grade school, in the early 1960s, adults complained about the jeepney as the “king of the road,” meaning they never followed traffic regulations. “Rolling coffins” was another term used because they were often involved in accidents.

Today, the reputation as rolling coffins has been given to buses, but the jeepneys continue to be kings of the roads and the only reason they don’t maim and kill as much in the cities is that they are now limited to smaller congested streets where they can’t run too fast. In rural areas though, the jeepneys, overloaded with passengers inside, as well as on the roof and hanging on to the back, race down wide highways as well as the narrowest country roads and sometimes end up in fatal accidents.

Holdup

This doesn’t mean the jeepneys are totally safe in cities. They do get into accidents even in the slow traffic because the drivers are always violating traffic rules and regulations, sometimes out of ignorance and sometimes because they know they’re “protected” from traffic enforcers as long as they pay their daily dues.

Sadly then, the jeepney seems now to represent a hold-up ethos. The passengers get “held up” too when drivers cut trips. Some weeks back a UP graduate student wrote me to ask if I could write about “trip-cutting,” where jeepneys skip some streets on their route, especially at night. For many helpless passengers, this means taking extra rides on other public transportation, jacking up their commuting expenses.

Finally, there has been the rise in recent years of, literally, highway robbery. Armed robbers, sometimes in cahoots with the drivers, relieve passengers of money, cell phones, jewelry. Woe to the passenger who puts up a fight; some have been shot dead. (Woe, too, to the amateur robbers who let their guard down and are overwhelmed by passengers who beat them to a pulp.)

From a quaint form of public transportation, the “dyip” has become a major problem for the Philippines. Yet they remain pretty much untouchable because politicians need the votes of the thousands of people employed by the jeepney industry—jeepney owners, drivers, barkers.

The FX [public transport vans — Ed.] is supposed to be an improvement on the jeepney, but isn’t that much better. From a public health perspective, it’s choosing your poison: diesel fumes and cigarette smoke inside the jeepney, or assorted respiratory viruses and corporal odors and flavors inside the FX.

The only salvation I see from jeeps and buses and FXs is a fast-track development of systems like the overhead Light Rail Transit and Metro Rail Transit, but the experiences we’ve had with political bickering suggest there are too many vested interests at work, keeping us dependent on older, inefficient and dangerous forms of mass transportation.

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Email: mtan@inquirer.com.ph