Angkas agrees to change pricing of motorcycle taxi

Motorcycle taxi service provider Angkas said Wednesday it will no longer impose a price surge to comply with the government’s revised rules on the implementation of pilot run for motorcycle taxis. 

“The reason for our dynamic pricing is essentially to be able to encourage more bikers on the road to meet the demand. But because it is not allowed in the pilot, we will comply,” Angkas chief transport advocate George Royeca said in a news briefing. 

“We just want to give a heads up that this may result in bikers going back to ‘habal-habal’ and that there’d be substantially fewer Angkas bikers on the road,” he said.

Royeca said Angkas also ceased operations in General Santos City and Cagayan De Oro City. “We have complied, there were no operations in CDO and GenSan. I hope we could still run our padala service…We are now focused on Metro Manila and Metro Cebu,” he said. 

Angkas made the announcement after the inter-agency technical working group of the Department of Transportation warned the app provider of possible blacklisting over the alleged violations of some provisions of the guidelines.

Under the guidelines, the government removed the indication for dynamic pricing and threatened to blacklist ride-hailing platforms operating outside the pilot run. 

The LTFRB guidelines also included We Move Things Philippines Inc. (Joyride) and Move It in the extension of the pilot run from Dec. 23 to March 23. 

The government also put an overall cap of 39,000 registered bikers for the three ride-hailing apps including 10,000 per transport network company for Metro Manila and 3,000 bikers per TNC for Metro Cebu.

Royeca said Angkas would continue to work with government regulators.

“We are also hopeful that lawmakers will find merit in what we have been espousing all these months”•that motorcycle taxis are crucial to addressing our countrymen’s mobility problems,” he said.

“Right from start, we worked hard to be compliant with everything the LTFRB and the DOTR’s TWG had set in the first motorcycle taxi test run. For six whole months last year, there was never any problem,” Royeca said.

“It must be noted that we complied with everything that the TWG asked us to do in the initial test run. We did a re-training of all our riders. We gave our riders safety vests based on the recommendation of the TWG.  We are continuously complying to the best of our abilities with the new pilot guidelines,” Royeca said. 

Royeca said of the total 117,166 bikers who applied with Angkas, only 36,797 bikers were onboarded. However, only 26,478 were retrained and activated for the first pilot run and 10,378 were deactivated.

He said that for six months from July to December 2019, the safety record of Angkas was 99.997 percent. 

“We tried our utmost best to maintain a high safety record for the benefit of all our passengers. We are proud to say that our high service standards were maintained in the test run,” Royeca said.