University of Basel Recalibrating Rhythm: Commuters Navigating Manila Through the Point-to-Point Bus Author: Supervisor: Carla Michelle Cruz Dr Sophie Oldfield Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the MA Critical Urbanisms in the Department of Urban Studies 1 Oct 2020 2 Abstract Commuting on public transport in Manila is difficult and tiring, an arduous essential task for ordinary urbanites. As a megacity in Asia, Metro Manila suffers from ‘the many ills of excessive street traffic’ (Boquet 2013, 45). The metropolis ranked second in the TomTom traffic index for 2019 for the worst urban congestion worldwide (2019). According to this ranking, Manila’s standing is calculated to be at seventy-one per cent congestion, which has made commuting worse. In fact, it has been estimated that the Philippines loses 3.5 billion pesos a day due to Metro Manila traffic alone (CNN-Philippines 2018). And while the current administration’s Build Build Build infrastructure program aims to decongest the roads in the future through the building of a subway (Camus 2019), it remains an inimitable fact that a large population of people are left commuting via public transportation or by way of privately owned vehicles. To address this crisis the government has built the point-to-point (P2P) bus system as part of the country’s public utility bus modernization program (DOTr Latest News 2016) to alleviate some of Metro Manila’s traffic and commuting issues between key areas of the megacity. In this thesis, I explore the rhythms and challenges of commuting on public transport, engaging the ways in which the P2P bus has reshaped the commuting experience. In this research I explore how the P2P bus is experienced by commuters, investigating how it recalibrates their rhythms, the time they spend commuting, their pace and conditions of travel, their emotions and their manners of moving through the city. I evaluate the various realities of commuting life, the hard work that comes with the everyday grind of the commute and the difference that the P2P bus makes in the commuter’s everyday lives by reshaping their rhythms. From Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis I draw three types of rhythms to frame the discussion, namely, eurythmia, linear rhythms and polyrythmia, in order to make sense of precisely how the P2P bus’ intervention reshapes and recalibrates the commuter’s experiences and rhythms. Therefore I argue that the commuter as a figure of mobility, and particular to this study, the figure of the Manila commuter, has a crucial role to play in the transformation of urban life. He or she is the mobile figure who has to withstand the erratic, often tangled nature of commuting life in this city, and therefore his or her experiences are unique and significant as these experiences of commuting are undeniably an extraordinary, unique kind of lived experience (Salazar 2017). Commuting in Manila as I have demonstrated in this thesis is a trying, but also changing, experience. Commuting as a form of mobility is constitutive of modern urban life. Though differentiated in the lived experiences practiced and produced in each place, it is a critical activity that shapes everyday lives and forms of mobility, a practice and dynamic that shapes cities across the world. 3 Acknowledgments I would like to thank the people I’ve had the pleasure of connecting and reconnecting with in my research, who shared a bit of their time to sit down with me and talk about their commuting narratives. Some were strangers, some were friends, some were old school mates— coming together to talk to me about relatable experiences on the P2P bus and the adventure that is commuting in Manila. To be able to write about my home city, and thereby listen to stories about mobility and movement especially in the strange, difficult times of 2020, has ultimately become my way of reinforcing my ties to home and hoping that the coronavirus situation soon changes for the better and allows everyone once more to be mobile. I thank my parents for being very supportive all throughout my graduate studies. I thank my advisers, Sophie and Laura, who were encouraging and reassuring of this topic in the first place, and who introduced me to the studies of mobilities and other interesting niches in research while in Cape Town. I thank peers and faculty in the Critical Urbanisms program at the University of Basel with whom I’ve shared, through thick and thin, this research journey since 2018. I thank my loved ones and friends from here in Switzerland and all over the world, whose support was very much a blessing, and I thank God for giving me the fortitude throughout my endeavour to carry on with my master’s. 4 Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................ 3 Acknowledgments ........................................................................................................... 4 List of Figures .................................................................................................................. 6 Introduction .................................................................................................................... 8 The trying commute in Metro Manila ........................................................................ 13 Commuting by the commuter and the role of rhythm: relevant research .............. 17 Commuting as a form of mobility ...................................................................................... 17 The commuting experience as shaped by infrastructure ................................................ 18 The commuter: a figure of mobility ................................................................................... 19 Rhythm as instrument to understand the commuter ...................................................... 20 Summary and Conclusion ................................................................................................... 23 The Point-to-Point Bus, an intervention in commuting ............................................ 25 Analytical design .................................................................................................................. 26 Methods to inform the research ......................................................................................... 27 Storying the commuter’s experiences ................................................................................ 28 The commuter meets the city ....................................................................................... 32 ‘Forget the rhythm’: the chaotic challenge of the Manila commuting scene ......... 36 The hassle of the commute: the hard work of commuting in Manila ............................ 36 ‘It’s really the time that eats you up’: feeling traffic through immobility and time ... 40 ‘Like how usual commuters do’: evading the persistent perils of commuting ............. 41 ‘On time, scheduled… I can sleep’: the intervention of the P2P bus ........................ 43 Permission to relax: shifting patterns of awareness on the P2P bus ............................. 43 ‘We share the same agony’: commuters shaping social rhythms on the P2P bus ....... 51 Recalibrating commuter rhythms ............................................................................... 55 ‘I think you move differently, when you know your rhythm’: reflections of the commuter .............................................................................................................................. 58 Discussion ...................................................................................................................... 60 The analysis of rhythms ....................................................................................................... 60 Achieving eurhythmia with the intervention of the P2P bus .................................................................. 60 Linearising commuting rhythms ............................................................................................................... 61 Engaging polyrhythms: coexisting rhythms ............................................................................................. 62 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 64 Bibliography .................................................................................................................. 67 Appendix: Interview Transcripts ................................................................................ 72 5 List of Figures Figure 1. An afternoon commute on the P2P bus on the way to Makati. Photo taken by author in January 2020. ........................................................................................................ 7 Figure 2. View of EDSA, Metro Manila’s main road artery, from the Skyway while riding the P2P bus on the way to Makati. Taken by the author in January 2020. ....... 12 Figure 3. Photo showing the queue for the jeepneys after work in Makati. Taken by the author in January 2020. ...................................................................................................... 14 Figure 4. The ATC-Greenbelt P2P bus at Greenbelt. Photo taken by the author in January 2020. ....................................................................................................................... 24 Figure 5. Available P2P routes as of January 2020. The main interest of this research is the ATC-Greenbelt