There is some good news and bad news for habal-habal (motorcycle-for-hire) drivers in Metro Cebu.
The bad news is a new law will prohibit habal-habal and motorcycle drivers from fetching children 10 years old and below as passengers.
While safety is the paramount concern, those who crafted the law may not have realized how the habal-habal drivers service those living in mountain or upland barangays.
Those residing in these areas cannot rely on buses or even jeepneys to transport them from one upland barangay to another, and so they rely on habal-habal drivers to fetch them from their homes and bring them to their destinations.
These include the children who also need to cross rivers to reach their school and back again as they head home. Maybe the law would exempt those living in the hinterland barangays who can only rely on the habal-habal riders to get them around.
Again, this law also applies to private motorcycle riders who argue that their vehicles are the only means of transporting their kids to and from their schools.
They would get a pass if their kids are teenagers, and even then, both motorcycle riders and habal-habal drivers cannot overload lest they be fined heavily.
Now for the good news, which may only cover Cebu City but if successful can be replicated in other Metro Cebu cities. Cebu City Hall has plans to allow transport network services firms like Grab and Angkas to contract habal-habal drivers who can now be hailed by commuters using a mobile app downloaded into their smartphones similar to Uber and Grab.
Although it had encountered opposition from the Land Transportation Office which reasoned that these hailing services have yet to comply with requirements, the Cebu City government had been quite enthusiastic about rolling out the habal-habal to the commuting public if only to provide them with a cheaper, seemingly viable mass transport alternative.
Again, the main argument about the habal-habal’s viability is its safety especially for children, and its fare rate system which would be regulated by a private transport service instead of the government which the LTO as a key government agency dealing in mass transport wants.
Can the public entrust their safety and convenience to these habal-habal drivers and by extension the transport network services that have contracted them without at least some government oversight?
The Cebu City government at least is banking on the chance that they will eventually embrace it as another transport option in a quickly developing field of mass transport services.
But that trust will have to be earned well by the drivers themselves who should police their ranks and rid them of abusive drivers who are out to exploit their passengers.
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