The Pagkakaisa ng mga Samahan ng Tsuper at Opereytor Nationwide (Piston) in Cebu will hold a protest rally or transport holiday – whatever they want to call it – to demand the recall of a policy that imposes higher fines to erring drivers and operators.
But their campaign against Joint Administrative Order (JAO) 2014-01 is not expected to gain public support.
By holding a transport strike, the drivers and operators will just earn quite the opposite: they will just antagonize the public.
Commuters will simply chuck it off as yet another inconvenience caused by protesting drivers and operators who don’t want to pay higher fines for violating traffic rules that can prevent congestions and accidents.
The students will not be affected by the transport strike because most of them are on semestral break. But the employees, who have to report to work at 8 a.m. lest they be deducted for tardiness, will be affected the most.
Since they rely on public transportation to take them to work, these rank and file will have to wait for the Kaohsiung buses provided by local governments in the absence of public utility jeepneys.
Piston’s protest actions stemmed from their impatience in the resolution of their demand to repeal the higher traffic fines and sanctions of JAO 2014-01 for violations as basic as refusing a passenger and discourteous behavior.
The transport agencies are said to have finished processing the revisions to the order but have yet to deliberate on these. As to when they will come out with the revisions and open these for review, they have yet to confirm.
But if they do submit them for review, we hope that the commuters be given the chance to speak out their concerns and call for accountability from both the Land Transportation Office and the Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board and the public transport sector.
After all, the commuters have always been on the receiving end of either a proposed fare rate increase or a traffic route scheme. They are the ones who suffer from undisciplined drivers who beat the red light to get ahead of the other drivers, and unload and load passengers in the middle of the street creating a congestion, just to name the few.
If you think about it, if only drivers are disciplined and follow the traffic rules, they don’t have to pay the fines. Unfortunately, they make their own traffic rules to the detriment of their passengers and other motorists.
They act like they own the street when they wantonly switch lanes or stop abruptly in the middle of the street without even considering that they are putting at risk the lives of their passengers and the motorists behind them.
Some drivers don’t even have the courtesy of allowing their passengers to sit properly first before speeding off. Yet, they want to stoke public sympathy through a transport strike.
Why can’t they show first that they are capable of following the traffic rules and be the drivers whom we can be proud of? Unless they can do that, it will be difficult for the commuters to sympathize with their cause.
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