Senior citizens’ travails in LRT Baclaran

WEDNESDAY IS Baclaran Day. This is the day when Marian devotees say their novena at the Shrine of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Baclaran. Likewise, this is the day when the Baclaran LRT station appears like an erupting volcano spewing out every hour a big number of people headed for the shrine. Conversely, after an hour, meaning, after one scheduled Mass or novena, the same big crowd troop back to the LRT station for the trip home.

Slowed down by age and arthritis and other ailments, many senior citizens must nevertheless elbow their way from the church, through thick crowds, for 15 minutes or more, to reach the station; additional minutes to get to the top of the crammed stairway, and more minutes of waiting in a kilometric line of fellow seniors for their turn at the only senior-citizen ticket booth issuing discounted trip cards.

Worse, the very long line advances in “very slow motion” because of the new system for issuing discounted tickets to senior citizens, which the LRT management began implementing in the first quarter of the year. This new system requires all senior citizens to line up, present their Senior Citizen ID cards to the only LRT agent at the booth, who then writes each senior citizen’s name in a record book, after which the senior citizen must sign his/her name in the record book, too, otherwise he/she wouldn’t be able to avail himself/herself of the discount privilege. Further slowing down the line’s advance are the elderly who, with trembling hands, take some time to sign their names.

Every Wednesday, one could hear senior citizens loudly clamoring for the return to the old ticket-issuing system that would spare them the long lines but not the discount privilege. But it seems the LRT officials and employees at the Baclaran station are deaf to their plaints. Until now, nothing is being done to ease the senior citizens’ plight.

—ESTHER L. BARACEROS,
faculty member,
College of Architecture,
University of Santo Tomas,
[email protected]