"This scheme against long-suffering commuters must be stopped."
It’s a shame that over six months of public health crisis have been exploited by entrepreneurs for profit, as well as by government officials for their own gain.
The mandatory use of beep cards at the EDSA Busway clearly dramatizes the ruthless profiteering poor Filipinos have been subjected to, even as they grope for ways to regain their livelihood.
Department of Transportation (DOTr) Secretary Arthur Tugade said he was surprised and found unacceptable the exorbitant cost of the beep card, designed for cashless payment of bus fare.
Tugade said he had not been informed of the high cost of the card and expressed extreme displeasure with the news. He thinks the beep card should be given free of charge.
AF Payments Inc. is the joint venture of the Ayala Group and the Manuel V. Pangilinan-led First Pacific group that manages the automatic fare payment system. It is this consortium that apparently imposed the excessive fee for the beep cards.
The digital tap-and-go card has been used at the Light Rail Transits (LRT) lines 1 and 2 and Metro Rail Transit (MRT) line 3. It has also been introduced at high-end restaurants.
Thousands of commuters, mostly daily wage earners, were shocked by the beep card fees. They had to walk to their workplace, unable to shell out P150 — P80 for the card and P70 for the initial load.
Highway robbery, indeed. P80 for the beep card could well be a worker’s lunch money or bus fare going home.
As a result, the DOTr yesterday announced it is temporarily suspending the mandatory use of beep cards after AF Payments Inc. refused to waive the fee of the card, saying it has incurred losses on the cost of supplying the card.
The DOTr should award the deal to another service provider with a sense of social responsibility. That, or scrap the whole scheme altogether.
These people saw how difficult life was for Filipinos, given their hand-to-mouth existence and efforts at getting to work amid the lack of affordable mass transportation.
The agony of the poor commuters transpires against the backdrop of the slow grind of justice on the multi-billion fleecing of Philippine Health Insurance Corp. (PhilHealth) and shameless wrangling of the big shots in Congress over the P4.1-trillion national budget.
The miserable state of public transportation has starkly highlighted, too, the widening gap between the rich and the poor.
Tens of thousands of impoverished Filipinos desperately struggling to return to their home provinces in the Visayas and Mindanao remain stranded in the Libingan ng mga Bayani and on the streets of Metro Manila.
They are the so-called Locally Stranded Individuals (LSIs) and Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) who are not allowed by the local government units (LGUs) to return home for fear of COVID-19 transmission to residents.
A privileged few, on the other hand, are going to the rehabilitated Boracay Island paradise where there are no age restrictions and where moneyed foreigners may be welcome soon.