How about more NEVs for mass transport?
Car buyers nowadays haven’t had it so good. I mean, look at the ever-widening range of options they have at their disposal. In my decades of covering the automotive beat, it’s really only in the last five years or so that I’ve witnessed the “holy trinity” of mechanical, electronic, and digital technologies merging in one specific industry to play equally significant roles in the research, design, engineering, manufacture and end-use of motorized vehicles. Today, when you’re in the market for a new car, you’re not just factoring in your transport needs, you’re also weighing in on the design, the safety and advanced driver assistance systems, the digital connectivity and infotainment features, and even having to decide what kind of propulsion system works for you. Gasoline? Diesel? Battery electric? Hybrid? Plug-in hybrid?
Today, car buyers can choose from virtually any global brand and model. From Audi to BYD, from Tesla Model Y to the Nissan Z, from Japan-made to Chinese origins. The market for cars has swung wide open, and the buffet table for car buyers is laden with all the industry goodies.
Meanwhile, let’s go and look over at what the Philippine mass transport system has to offer for the daily commuters. There are the smoke-belching, noisy, diesel-powered jeepneys, many of them more than 15 years old; there are the diesel-powered buses, also about 15 years or older and coughing out black smoke from their tailpipes; there are the noisy (and unsafe) tricycles plying the secondary and tertiary roads, and often weaving left and right on our highways while gradeschool kids cling to all sides like they were in an amusement ride; there are the limited number of electric-powered elevated light-rail trains packing in hundreds of thousands of weary commuters every day; and then there’s the PNR train plying the Tutuban-Alabang route…oh, wait, that ship has sailed and is never coming back.
In short, this is the real-world scenario between motorists and commuters in the Philippines: It’s a buffet for car buyers, but a soup kitchen for public transport commuters.
It’s great that automotive technologies are growing by leaps and bounds. That’s undeniable. But for as long as only 10 or 15% of the Philippine population benefit from that (the percentage of Filipinos who actually own cars), then those technological advancements aren’t used to their full potential. Of course, new energy vehicles (NEVs such as EVs and hybrids) are here to help lessen tailpipe emissions, but if they aren’t applied to mass transport systems, then their purpose, insofar as lessening our tailpipe emissions from our overall transport ecosystem, is defeated.
But let’s be clear on one thing. Let’s not pin everything on technology. There needs to be behavioral change as much as technology change for there to be any meaningful shifts in the way we as a society do things. UK-based energy experts Jillian Anable and Christian Brand—both from the University of Oxford—wrote in their piece “Is the Future Electric?” (In “The Climate Book”) that behavioral change and technological change are intimately interlinked: Political leaders, town planners, manufacturers, and consumers need to adopt, enable and promote new travel habits, as well as adopting new technologies. These authors call this “mode switching” whereby inefficient or polluting modes of travel are swapped for more efficient ones on like-for-like journeys: Taking public transport, walking or cycling, instead of making a short car journey.
I’ll be writing more about meaningful behavioral changes keeping pace with the technological breakthroughs taking place in certain cities around the world in my next columns. It’s good that we get inspiration from these examples to fit our local circumstances.
This is a long-overdue matter that our society needs to address. The gap between car owners and public commuters is widening. More food is being brought to the buffet table, even while the line at the soup kitchen grows ever longer. There’s an obvious imbalance that needs immediate and decisive correction.
