Dead bus franchises resurrected by LTFRB

There is an old saying that “you cannot put 10 pounds of s–t in a five-pound bag.” Which makes sense. But that is what the Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board (LTFRB) is trying to do—put 10 pounds of s–t in a five-pound bag.

It has just granted franchises for 489 buses in the Edsa-provincial routes to five bus companies owned by one family. You see the chaos on Edsa every day: Too many vehicles. Many of the buses have only a few passengers; there are too many buses competing for the same passengers. Where will the LTFRB put the extra 489 buses?

Why is the LTFRB doing this? Probably because while Edsa is already overcrowded, the pockets of some people are not.

The five lucky bus companies are Victory Liner, Five Star, Bataan Transit, First North Luzon Co. and Cisco—all owned by one lucky (or influential) family, the Hernandez family, the biggest bus operator in Luzon. All their buses ply choice routes between Metro Manila and Central Luzon, and between Metro Manila and Northern Luzon.

The 489 represent the choice lines of the 1,100 lines of the long defunct Pantranco. The remaining lines not transacted by the LTFRB were short distance provincial routes that do not touch Metro Manila—with very little commercial value.

The addition of 489 buses into the already clogged Metro Manila roads would cause more chaos on the main roads of the metropolis. What the LTFRB should do is reduce the number of vehicles in Metro Manila, not increase them. The award of the franchises violates the “tuwid na daan” that the Aquino administration wants every government agency to take. First and foremost, the awarded lines are dead franchises.

The validity of the Pantranco franchises expired in 1993. For the last two decades, the LTFRB and the Department of Transportation and Communications have been issuing rulings saying only one thing—the lines have long expired and they can neither be sold nor transferred to other parties.

In January 2012, Rep. Angelo Palmones of the party-list Agham made an official inquiry with the LTFRB on the Pantranco issue and he was told that the lines had expired in 1993 and there was no legal basis for resurrecting them. Palmones is a member of the labor committee of the House of Representatives, which was then hearing the case of Pantranco workers.

Before the end of May, when everybody was glued to the impeachment trial, the LTFRB violated 20 years of its own rulings and awarded the Pantranco lines supposedly to its workers. The workers promptly sold the lines to the companies of the Hernandez family. According to rumors, it was a sale pre-arranged by crooks at the LTFRB, who packaged the whole scam. They allegedly charged P150,000 each for the 489 lines. The going rate for a provincial line touching Metro Manila is P500,000 per line (franchise only), and the Hernandez family grabbed the bargain.

This act of impunity by P-Noy’s shooting buddy has tarnished his “tuwid na daan” policy and is a direct assault on the moratorium imposed by the DOTC on the grant of new lines. Only applications for missionary and development routes are being processed.

As reported in the newspapers, even the most corrupt schemers in the Arroyo administration had tempered the urge to resurrect the dead Pantranco franchises because they realized that there could never be any credible legal basis to justify the revival of the long-expired lines.

Furthermore, the LTFRB has already filled up the expired lines of Pantranco by awarding, a long time ago, the majority of the unserved lines to various bus companies serving Central Luzon and Northern Luzon.

The award of 489 lines in a single decision to one bus-owning family has not been done in the 25 years of LTFRB’s existence—that is, until now. And this happened during a regime, supposedly, of integrity, transparency and accountability.

The LTFRB has very strict prerequisites for extending provincial bus franchises. A supervision fee is imposed on each bus. Each franchise has to be matched by a live bus—one that is roadworthy and subject to LTFRB inspection—every year. In the Pantranco award, the LTFRB extended the franchises based on ghost buses. Because Pantranco closed down in the early 1990s, everything was gone: terminals, buses, support infrastructure, etc. If a supervision fee was indeed paid each year for the purpose of extending the lines, where is the money?

Only last June 19, the 25th anniversary of the LTFRB, Transportation Secretary Mar Roxas, the guest of honor, exhorted the LTFRB officials and rank-and-file to end the regime of “palusot” of franchising and backsliding—and now this horrible revelation about the raising up of 489 lines from the dead and making millions of pesos out of them.

The association of Northern and Central Luzon Bus Operators has written a letter to Secretary Roxas protesting the resurrection of the dead franchises and the awarding of these franchises to one family. They say they were not notified of the hearing to resurrect and re-award the franchises. They were only alerted at a very late time by a small notice of the hearings on the dead franchises in a small newspaper.

“The award has no redeeming feature whatsoever,” the protesting bus operators wrote Roxas. “It was done with indecent haste. In fact, there was no Formal Offer of Evidence, and oppositors were not given a chance to look into and comment on the applicant’s evidence. Likewise, the oppositors were given only up to May 31, 2012 to file their Position Papers (10 days from receipt of reply), but the decision was issued and promulgated on May 21, 2012. There was no transparency in the award, and not a single provision of the Public Service Law was enhanced by the resurrection of the dead franchises.”