BY ALEX ALAGON
Last Friday, the crawl from Matina to downtown felt less like a commute and more like a collective test of endurance. As the afternoon heat shimmered off the asphalt and traffic stalled near a gasoline station, the taxi driver, Lando, heaved a weary sigh that seemed to carry the weight of the entire transport sector.
He didn’t complain about the gridlock—in Davao, that’s just the norm these days. Instead, he pointed toward the neon glow of the price board at the pump.
“Ma’am,” he said, his voice dropping into that low, candid tone drivers use when they’re about to deliver a hard truth. “If that hits 100 pesos per liter, I’m done. I’ll park this taxi for good and just look for manual labor. At least then, my sweat won’t be evaporated by a fuel tank I can’t afford to fill.”
For Lando, the ongoing war in the Middle East isn’t a distant headline or a subject for academic debate. It is a ghost sitting in his passenger seat, silently calculating his take-home pay before he even shifts into second gear. When he hears of escalating tensions across the globe, he doesn’t think of geopolitics, he thinks of the kilo of rice that might have to be cut from his family’s table.
There is a raw, unfiltered sociology that happens sitting at the passenger seat. For him, “hope” has become a luxury item, much like the fuel he burns while idling in the Matina traffic.
He spoke of the “stabilization” of oil prices as if it were a memory from decades ago. To Lando, the volatility of the world has finally reached a tipping point where the labor no longer outweighs the financial toll. “Maypa balik ta ani pag-uma (It’s better if we go back to farming),” he mumbled.
Getting stuck in traffic is usually a nuisance, but it offers one distinct advantage – it forces us to listen. In the stillness of that Friday afternoon, Lando’s ultimatum felt like a warning bell. If the people who move our city lose the hope that they can sustain their lives by doing so, we aren’t just looking at a transport crisis—we’re looking at a disconnection of the city’s very heart.
As we finally cleared the congestion and headed toward the city center, the meter kept clicking. But for Lando, the real countdown isn’t on the dashboard; it’s on the price board at the station, inching ever closer to that 100-peso mark.
Just as Lando has his breaking point, the daily wage earner also bears the burden of the oil increase. This breaking point happens when the cost of living (fare+food+utilities) goes beyond the daily wage. There is a growing, heavy realization that no matter how hard they work, they are running on a treadmill that is speeding up faster than their feet could carry them.
Daily wage earners feel the oil price hike most acutely at the carinderia or the market because every vegetable, grain of rice, and piece of fish in Davao traveled there on a truck or boat fueled by diesel, the price of oil is essentially the price of food.
When the “listahan” or the credit notebook at the local sari-sari store grows longer, it’s because the oil prices have shortened the reach of the daily wage. There is a quiet, desperate dignity in choosing which meal to skip because the transport of that meal became too expensive for the consumer to absorb.
Whether it’s Lando behind the wheel or the passenger behind him, the sentiment is identical, when the oil price moves, a family’s future shifts.
