I REMEMBER that it was my mentor, the late Jose Conrado “Joly” Benitez who told me that in many developed countries, the housing programs are always done in tandem with the transportation programs, meaning that these two programs have to work together side by side, or back-to-back, to put it another way.
In reality, it does not always happen that housing projects are planned with built-in transportation services, but can you imagine how convenient it would be if housing residents could just hop in and hop out of buses where they live, thus sparing them the inconvenience of looking for bus rides far away from where they live?
I remember that I used to enjoy that convenience, when there were airconditioned “Love Buses” that were waiting in my village in the mornings, and then they would also be waiting in parking lots in Makati in the afternoons, to bring me back to my village.
Fast forward to today, this bus service has been revived in some villages, via the so-called “point to point” (P2P) bus routes.
Aside from the commercial P2P buses, I think that it would be a good idea for village associations or community-based cooperatives to have their own shuttle buses. Aside from the benefit of convenience, it could also become a good source of revenue for them, because their residents or members could become the paying passengers.
It is for the above reasons why I am now looking for a mobile app that could bill residents and members on a monthly basis, instead on a “per ride” basis. Just like a mobile phone company, the passengers could either get prepaid accounts or postpaid accounts.
In the case of coop members, they could also get rebates and dividends, just like any coop product or service./PN
