‘Excuse slips’ for MRT riders? DOTC clarifies

Transportation Secretary Joseph Abaya clarified on Tuesday a report that his department would be issuing “excuse letters” for passengers who show up late for work every time the Metro Rail Transit (MRT) suffers a breakdown.

“No such policy now,” Abaya said in a text message, adding that the Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) was also planning to stop issuing incident reports whenever the train system suspends operations due to a malfunction.

According to Abaya, the last time an incident report was issued was on May 12. “Historically, [the] MRT has issued incident reports—not excuse letters or slips— for those who have asked, but not on the scale of hundreds at any one time. No such policy now and we plan to halt … any issuances even [on] a small scale.”

Abaya added that they were consulting with IT personnel on the possibility of posting notices on the DOTC websites on the suspension or resumption of train operations and on the number of trains running at a given hour.

“That way, employees and employers can just check [the] websites if indeed there were incidents, and also to show transparency on the number of trains running hourly,” Abaya said.

Earlier, a DOTC statement said it would be issuing incident reports “to any requesting member of the general public for whatever useful purposes this may serve, in line with the policy of transparency.”

“This is a transparency measure. People deserve to know what problems occurred, anything that could cause a stoppage from a broken rail to air-conditioning that stopped working,” DOTC spokesperson Michael Sagcal said in a wire report.

The “incident report,” however, will only certify the cause of the delay and will not be worded as an excuse letter for tardiness, he told Agence France-Presse. “It’s up to the requesting individual how to use it,” Sagcal said when asked if the document could be used as an excuse letter.

The MRT is the busiest of the three elevated railway lines in Metro Manila, moving over half a million people per day, above its designed capacity for only 350,000. Due to maintenance problems, only seven MRT trains are now operating daily, down from a regular run using 20 trains.