Beyond Appointments: Reorganizing DOTC and DPWH

The appointment of Sen. Mar Roxas to the position of Secretary of the Department of Transportation and Communication (DOTC) after the resignation of Department of Transportation and Communication (DOTC) Sec. Ping de Jesus (plus three other DOTC undersecretaries) has given Aquino's party president a strategic post with which to propell his fledging political career. Being in charge with DOTC means, as a columnist put it, being “in charge of huge projects, big-ticket items that have been the milking cow of corrupt individuals in the past.” ZTE-NBN, NAIA Terminal 3, North Luzon Railways Project, SCTEX, RORO, and the STRADCOM controversies clearly come to mind.

DOTC is in fact one of the more strategic agencies in the Philippine bureaucracy, since a "viable, efficient, and dependable transportation and communications systems" are "effective instruments for national recovery and economic progress," as DOTC's wikipage puts it. It is thus not surprising that former Sec. de Jesus' resignation caused some panic on possible political impacts (see this also) of such on Aquino's 1-year old administration, but this is mostly because DOTC is a crucial position to begin with. DOTC's political power derives from its position in the overall narrative of economic development - a behemoth of sorts combining in one agency two widely different sectors: the transportation industry and the communications sector.

Is such a gargantuan creation as DOTC fit to lead us towards economic modernization?

MMDA's odd-even scheme, biased against the poor

MMDA's odd-even scheme as implemented only to public utility buses shows MMDA's bias for owners of privately-owned vehicles - bias for the well-off as against the poor who can't afford their own vehicle. Politicians are going for the kill as they pith the transport workers and the commuters. This is very saddening.

Commuters wait for buses during rush hour on Monday after bus operators went on a flash strike to protest a number coding scheme being implemented by the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority with a view to reducing traffic congestion. Image Credit: AP (caption and pic lifted here)

If anything, we should be regulating private cars first, with private cars' "road-space-taken" per "person-transported" ratio being way more than that of buses. To prove this, we only need to see that even as the odd-even scheme was applied (setting off a bus strike), traffic was not substantially reduced (see lead paragraph).

Proposals to Resolve the Recurring Oil Crisis in the Philippines

I have written a piece, originally for Palag Na! but later for Pagkakaisa ng Manggagawa sa Transportasyon (PMT), that is meant to consolidate and give a framework for proposals, both popularly demanded and what we managed to come up with, to resolve the recurring oil crisis in the Philippines. This is in the context of the oil price crisis of mid-2008. But the proposals, I think, remain valid even if the financial crisis and the global recession eroded the price of petroleum recently.

As with any alternative, the long-term and strategic changes needed is inevitably tied with the short-term and the mid-term - so the short-term measure of regulating the domestic downstream oil industry is inevitably related to the mid-term measure of supply-side management and industrial structure and the long-term vision of demand-side management towards oil independence, assuming oil to be a finite resource. Realizing these proposals, of course, must be accompanied with better service standards from the end of the transportation industry (and workers) themselves, something which can be developed later on.