NEW GEN TRANSPORTATION

JOSHUA VALENZUELA

Two years after the pandemic, we’ve been robbed of a lot of wonderful things, the chance to experience face-toface classes, onsite jobs, socializations, celebrations, and other physical activities that the spread of the COVID-19 virus has brought us. But now, things got better, we are now transitioning to how things were. The regular classes inside campuses, onsite jobs in their own offices, and physical interaction with people that we haven’t seen in person for a very long time.

As we shift from the new normal to the better normal, the shifting of one of the things that makes everything we missed for the past two years possible began too—the uprising of the new generation vehicles, or the public transportation industry version 2.0.

Amid the pandemic, the first modern jeepneys started to appear in the province of Oriental Mindoro. A public transportation that is made more convenient for the commuters having air conditioning units in these new types of jeepneys.

Exclusive Convenience

“Personally po, okay po siya sakin kasi mas comfortable po kami sa byahe at feeling po namin ay talagang nakakasabay na po talaga tayo sa modernization”, this is one of the responses from the passengers who first handedly experienced the service of the modernized jeepneys.

But the convenience that it gives is not for everyone, it is eluded by other people, specifically to those who own the old-fashioned jeepneys and multi-cabs who suffer in ways that this uprising treats them as pests in the public transportation industry. And this also happens in the City of Calapan.

“MANONG

PARA PO”

This is what our passengers say when they want the driver to acknowledge them that they are leaving aboard public transportation. And now, our drivers of the old-fashioned jeepneys and multi-cabs in the city are now the ones who seem to be asking for acknowledgment and attention as these of our drivers who financially cannot manage to partake in the transition from oldfashioned to modernized transportation is so loud due to how visible the changes in their income are as they were easily overshadowed by this uprising that they have no control of.

BETRAYAL stepped into danger to gain money for their living and for these passengers to attend to their needs during the pandemic and now they felt like these people turned their back on them after modernized transportation arises.

“Mas mabuti pa nung pandemic malaki-laki ang kinikita namin”, a jeepner driver said in an interview regarding the matter.

Upon interviewing multicabs and jeepney drivers, they clarified that they are not against the new-generation public transportation, hence, they are just asking for a mechanism to be created by the city government to