OSMEÑA
CEBU City Mayor Tomas Osmeña said he will establish the “habal-habal” or motorcycles for hire as a legitimate industry in the city by tapping it to transport school children and hiring seniors to manage their terminals.
“We are experimenting on two programs, for students and senior citizens,” Osmeña said in yesterday’s press conference. The mayor said he is in talks with groups of habal-habal drivers to discuss his programs for them.
He said he wants to subsidize the habal-habal drivers of mountain barangays with food and rice so that children don’t need to walk up and down hills to attend school.
Osmeña said he plans to build a habal-habal terminal near JY Square, Barangay Lahug to be operated by the senior citizens there. He said he doesn’t have a target date for the terminal but preferred to work on it right away.
“In that way, nobody can accuse City Hall of making money. That is the basic point,” Osmeña said. He said there will be rules set up and drivers will have personal numbers drawn on their back to identify them.
Osmeña believed that the senior citizens are likely motivated to enforce the rules.
“We can monitor the outsiders from coming in and the behavior of the drivers and we’ll discipline them for safety purposes,” he said.
Certain agencies which Osmeña declined to mention will be tapped to conduct workshops for habal-habal drivers. He said he has a plan to have a “co-op” where the drivers can buy the motorcycles’ spare parts.
“The whole long range point of this exercise is to pave the way to set a model on how the habal-habal can be a legitimized industry,” Osmeña said.