Metro mobility: Surviving as a mistake
The Land Transportation Office’s (LTO) latest attempt to brusquely remove light electric vehicles (LEVs), e-bikes, and e-trikes from Metro Manila’s major roads did not come out of nowhere. It is, in fact, the predictable outcome of a government that habitually arrives late to social realities—and responds not with learning, but with enforcement.
To understand the current controversy, we must begin with a basic truth: Filipinos did not wake up one day and decide to undermine traffic laws. They woke up needing to go to work, to school, to markets, to hospitals—often in places where government-provided transport simply does not exist.
In the provinces, the now-famous habal-habal was never a reckless invention. It was a rational response to steep hills, muddy tracks, river crossings, and the absence of roads that four-wheeled vehicles could traverse. When the state could not—or would not—build access, people improvised mobility.
That improvisation carried over to the cities. Boat engines used in island pump boats were refitted into cargo tricycles. Multilevel trikes were designed for people and goods. More recently, e-bikes and e-trikes emerged as affordable, energy-efficient ways to fill the yawning gaps left by an inadequate public transport system. These were not luxuries; they were coping mechanisms.
This is where the critical distinction lies—one our regulators persistently fail to grasp.
Much of what we now label “illegal” was once merely non-legal: activities not yet covered by law because the law itself had not kept pace with reality. Informal solutions flourish precisely where formal systems fail. They multiply because they work—until they become visible enough to be declared a problem.
The LTO’s current approach collapses this entire historical process into a crude enforcement narrative. After years of tolerating LEVs—during which they clearly eased mobility for thousands—the agency belatedly declares them unsafe and unwelcome on major roads, with insufficient warning and minimal public explanation. Rules are announced, retracted, postponed, and re-announced, eroding what little credibility remains.
No serious institution behaves this way.
Licensing and regulation, in principle, are not wrong. In fact, they are necessary. But regulation assumes something crucial: institutional capacity. It assumes an agency capable of processing registrations, educating drivers, communicating clearly, enforcing fairly, and preventing corruption.
The uncomfortable reality is that the LTO has repeatedly demonstrated it is not up to this task.
In the Philippines, learning to drive has simply meant learning how to operate a vehicle—not how to understand traffic systems, signage, right-of-way, or road ethics. Driver education has been reduced to a transactional hurdle, widely perceived as difficult not to ensure safety, but to extract informal payments. The driver’s license exam has become less a test of competence than a test of patience—or resistance to fixers.
This combination of monopoly authority, discretion, and weak accountability is precisely the environment that breeds corruption. When demand spikes—as it will with mass LEV registration—the result is predictable: longer queues, more fixers, higher bribes, and the exclusion of the very people these vehicles serve.
Seen in this light, the current LTO campaign is not about road safety alone. Without first earning legitimacy, competence, and capacity, it is the creation of entry-level opportunities for corruption.
The deeper failure, however, is not the LTO’s alone. Congress has shown little capacity to imagine transportation policy from the standpoint of the poor, the informal worker, or the commuter outside the car-owning class. For decades, our national transport vision has been shaped around private vehicles and large infrastructure projects, not around inclusive, fine-grained mobility systems.
Presidents come and go, but the bureaucracy they inherit remains largely unreformed—tolerant of everyday corruption and indifferent to the time stolen from ordinary lives.
So, when the LTO suddenly decides it must “act,” it does so with the only tool it truly knows: prohibition. Not consultation. Not transition. Not phased formalization. Just enforcement—late, loud, and blunt.
The tragedy is that LEVs did not create our transport crisis. They merely revealed it.
If the state had provided reliable, affordable, and accessible transport; if it had educated drivers instead of monetizing exams; if it had planned ahead instead of reacting—there would have been no vacuum for informal innovations to fill.
Until government learns to move at the speed of the people—and not decades behind them—this cycle will repeat. Informality will emerge, flourish, and then be criminalized. And Filipinos, once again, will be told that surviving was the mistake.
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doyromero@gmail.com
