By Jan Vicente B. Pekas
In order to get home, there are only ever two realistic options for us. The jeepneys and the busses. Both of our transports are located at different parts of town. One is located beside the ever popular Good Taste restaurant near Burnham Park. While the busses are cramped inside Governor Pack Road. For over a decade now, those two have always been the reliable transport for us to get home and get to town. To get to school and from school. To go to work and survive and to go to school and learn. Without both, then it would be just like the pandemic, isolated from the city and stuck in the mountains.
It isn’t just us who consider the jeep and the bus our lifelines. More people from farther homes need transportation that deliver them to the city in order to survive. From outside Baguio come the farmers who sell their crops. Vendors who come and sell their wares. Students who chase attendance. Employees who wake up earlier than their counterparts who live in the city. The veins that are the roads going into Baguio, once it loses those that deliver the oxygen, the foods, the workforce, then the heart simply dies.
This week, as I was taking the bus to head home, the konduktor informed us of a 5 peso increase for ticket prices. From the 23 peso (Already with the student discount), our fares would then just be below 30 pesos. It would be the first time our fares have ever increased this high.
Commuters cannot possibly handle such a burden.
I particularly remember a fellow commuter who was seated beside me some time ago, a mother. She traveled to Baguio City to visit her son who was caught in an accident and had to be rushed to the Baguio General Hospital. As she paid, she did not get her cash from her wallet, but had to get them from the empty plastic chips bag.
It was the first time I had ever seen such a thing. Throughout the trip she opened up about her own struggles. I remember that she was a vendor who had to take care of a staggering amount of children.
For the many people who rely on public transportation to survive, they are already stretched to the limits. The cost of living was already way too high to begin with. And now that the one thing that cannot be erased in our everyday lives, that which we rely on to survive, is too a being that kills us slowly. The common person is surrounded at all sides.
In what seems like an endless wave of punishments towards the common people, there has been no respite. For a group of people that is already struggling, there has only been a multiplication of problems.
Public transportation is what helps people survive. But if even that is rendered too expensive, then living itself has been made too costly.
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