Once upon a time, I thought that commuting would be a tough sell for my only daughter, based on my own personal car-centric experience.
However, after she learned the ropes of commuting, our problem has been stopping her from going out because now that she has been empowered, there is no longer the need to coordinate with us, her car-bound parents, to get to Bacolod from Silay when she needs to do stuff.
She just tells us she is going and while we are still thinking about who is going to Bacolod that she could hitch with, or if there are any errands that we can run so she can ride with us if she can wait a little bit, she is already on her way out of the door because she will just commute na lang.
It’s not that our public transportation system has improved vastly over the past 30 years, which was when I was her age, but things have definitely changed. There is certainly a shift in the perception towards public transport. When I was that age, I was a much more pretentious little bitch who would rather be riding or driving a car than a jeepney. My daughter, on the other hand, prefers the independence over the convenience.
So, if she needs to go to Bacolod and there is no ride, she will just take a jeepney to the Northbound terminal, and take another jeepney to wherever it is she needs to go, which is usually school or the mall. It also helps that our house is just a block away from the main road and some sort of a jeepney/bus stop (if such a thing exists in this country).
We have talked about learning to drive, but ever since she found out that my rule is that she was going to have to learn driving with a manual transmission, it kind of lost the appeal for her. Up to now, I’m still following up with her when she will get her student permit so she can start to learn to drive our stick shift car, but since she can get almost anywhere she currently needs to go by commuting, that student permit project hasn’t been a priority anymore.
Aside from learning to drive, she will also have to deal with parking, along with needing to know the directions of where it is you need to go. I guess that even if commuting is not ideal in this country, everything that goes with driving is still too much work for her.
Although it is a bit disappointing that she doesn’t seem to want to learn to drive anymore, it is also nice to see her being so independent. If you come to think of it, even if she does drive, she will still have to ask permission to use the car every time, because it’s obviously not her car. However, as a commuter, all she has to do is tell me where she is going and when she expects to get back home. Rain or shine, day or night, commuting doesn’t faze her anymore.
It’s gotten to the point where she gets home pretty late already, way past dinner time. Which is both annoying and worrying for parents. When she started out, she would commute only before sunset/rush hour, because we didn’t want her to be too inconvenienced and also to give us a bit more peace of mind, since we still have this worry that a lot more things can go wrong when it gets dark. Her lolo, who is in Metro Manila has noticed that his favorite granddaughter is getting busy, and is dropping comments at us that we shouldn’t be allowing her to commute when it’s already late, because he didn’t do that to his daughter (her mom) back then. Chastised, we say that we can have her picked up, but she insists that she is fine commuting, and sending the car to Bacolod just to pick her up is too not only a bother for those who have to pick her up, it also costs so much more.
If you come to think of it, she is ok with commuting, even if the public transportation system still sucks. The worst part of it for her, so far, is all the unnecessary waiting, because there are no schedules and passengers are at the mercy of a driver who will often not leave until the jeepney is considered “full” enough. That wastes so much time among commuters who have no way of predicting how long a trip will take, and unless our government officials are somehow forced to start commuting themselves, it is something that no modernization program in any town or city has dared to address.
My daughter shouldn’t be fine with commuting, but she is, even if she has a choice. If only our public transport system were truly modern, even more people would be using it, not because they have no other choice, but because it is more convenient and efficient than having your own car or chauffeur.*
