The Department of Transportation (DOTr) welcomes the decision of AF Payments Inc. (AFPI) to provide 125,000 free beep cards to EDSA Busway commuters in light of the financial hardships they have to face daily amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Earlier Monday, Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque said that President Rodrigo Roa Duterte is against the imposition of additional charges for public transportation using beep cards, citing the expensive costs sustained by commuters amid the pandemic.

According to Roque, the suspension of the mandatory use of beep cards is proof that the government is listening and the Duterte administration has a heart.

We thank AFPI for seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, and for considering the plight of our commuters who have just started to rebuild back their lives after a series of strict quarantine measures that put pressure both on their social lives and livelihoods.

For them, every centavo counts.

We appreciate the plan of AFPI to set aside the prospect of profit for the meantime, to answer the call of need from our commuters and to give them free beep cards until a QR-based electronic ticketing system becomes operational.

We, however, note that the 2015 public-private partnership program that replaced the old magnetic card-based ticketing system in the three light railway lines in Metro Manila with the beep card is an issue best reserved for discussion at a later date, with the parties involved.

Let us first focus on our goal to make the commuting experience of passengers on the EDSA Busway convenient and affordable, in the light of compassion.

As for the use of a QR code-based electronic ticketing system on the EDSA Busway, allow us to point out that the system has always been one of our options for cashless transactions.

In fact, we have considered the use of this long before the outbreak of the pandemic. We believe that this will not be as tedious to implement on the EDSA Busway, as the facilities and the know-how for it is readily available.

With the use of a smartphone app and/or through online, passengers of vessels can now buy virtual tickets. As this is a contactless technology, commuters are best assured of proper social distancing needed to prevent transmission of the coronavirus.

In the Philippine Ports Authority (PPA), the use of QR codes as part of the functionalities of its automated ticketing and fare collection should be more than enough to prove that the QR code technology will now form part of the “new normal.”

A study by Statista, a German company specializing in market and consumer data, showed that as of 2019, there were approximately 74 million smartphone users in the Philippines, and it has continued to rise since 2015.

The research company forecasts that by 2025, there would be around 90 million smartphone users in the Philippines.

Thus, we believe that the use of QR technology for electronic ticketing on the EDSA Busway remains one viable option for commuters.

Finally, we also wish to note that the government welcomes proposals from other automatic fare collection system (AFCs) providers, as long as their systems are ready for integration, and will not place additional charge or burden to commuters. DOTr-LTFRB

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