business & economy

Also in this section:
Panama Canal expansion debate
Most mainstream media slanting canal expansion story toward government side
Bus strike averted
Business & Economy Briefs

Urban transport confrontation postponed, not resolved

Bus strike averted
by Eric Jackson, in part from other media

This reporter's experiences with this country's urban buses go back to the mid-60s in Colon, and after a 28-year gap living in the USA, resumed more than a dozen years ago, mainly in the capital. It's nothing to boast about, really, although there are a number of people who have written guide for gringos living in or visiting Panama who deign to pontificate about the bus system having neither used it nor lowered themselves to associate as equals with anyone who has. Actually, it belies a huge knowledge gap, given that in the interim to the north, the military regime headed by one Omar Torrijos overthrew the allegedly monopolistic urban bus companies and replaced them with a system of individual driver/owners organized into syndicates or cooperatives. From old timers one can occasionally hear opinions about the old system, but never very precise comparisons, because in the meantime Panama changed from a mainly rural to a mainly urban society and it just isn't very easy to compare the way that the capital was run in 1966 to the way things are now.

Suffice to say, the way things are now, our urban transportation system beats the hell out of Detroit's but is increasingly unsatisfactory both to those who depend upon it and those who make their living in it.

Whether intended or not, by the dictatorship's end we were left with an often mobbed up system of bus and taxi syndicates; a public transportation bureaucracy noted mainly for the corruption of successive waves of people who have run it; an economic paradigm that's for the most part unsustainable; too many buses crowding too-small streets in peak hours and hardly any buses late at night or early in the morning; and city noise, congestion and pollution problems that will not be solved if we continue with the system of "diablos rojos" --- former US school buses imported used, painted up and pressed into mass transit service here. Add the pressure of sky-high oil prices and the abuses of a relatively few dangerously crazy drivers, and you get an idea of the problem. The buses still meet a need, but everyone knows that things need to change.

And so it is that Martín Torrijos, having scrapped the plans for a light rail system that his predecessor planned without the economic means to implement, looks set to reverse what his daddy did way back when. The proposal is to create a metropolitan bus company to replace the diablos rojos with larger, "articulated" buses that carry more passengers and still can make Panama City's tight turns. Being a devotee of the neoliberal economic religion, of course, Torrijos the younger wants that new company to be private.

Wouldn't there be political resistance to that? Of course there is, and in the face of it the proposal has evolved. Instead of a single winning bidder who, as La Estrella alleged in a front-page editorial, "has a name and a surname" determined in advance, now it is said that more than one company. However, the government announced that there would be a bidding process in which the diablo rojo driver/operators could participate --- if they have an existing company that does $5 million in business in a year and can show $50 grand in ready cash.

Nobody was fooled by the bid qualification standards, and the Panamanian Transport Chamber (CANATRA), the umbrella group of bus cooperatives, syndicates and mafias called for a May 15 bus strike over the metro reorganization plan, plus the government's plan for an imminent end to a quarter-a-gallon subsidy on diesel fuel that buses use.

A bus strike would paralyze virtually all economic activity in this country. We have lots of cars on the road, and plenty of taxis, but most working people ride the bus. When one considers that more than two-third of all employed Panamanians make less than $400 a month, a bit of math makes it clear that buying a car or taking taxis is not a viable alternative, and if one knows the urban history of commerce and government services being concentrated in certain areas and housing for working people sprawling ever farther from those places, it will become apparent that a walk from Tocumen to Plaza Cinco de Mayo isn't an option either. There are an awful lot of us who live at or near the places where we work, but not nearly enough to keep the national economy running in times of no buses.

So it came to pass that Minister of Government and Justice Olga Golcher was obliged to sit through a four-hour meeting with dozens of bus driver leaders on May 11. It wasn't a realistic option for her to walk out of that negotiation without some sort of agreement.

As it turned out, the government promised to extend the subsidy on diesel fuel for four months, and to an unspecified modification of the bidding rules for the metro area bus reorganization. In return, CANATRA called off its plans for a May 15 strike.

Also in this section:
Panama Canal expansion debate
Most mainstream media slanting canal expansion story toward government side
Bus strike averted
Business & Economy Briefs