Recalibrating rhythm: commuters navigating Manila through the P2P bus

Commuting on public transport in Manila is difficult and tiring, an arduous essential task for ordinary urbanites. As a megacity in Asia, Metro Manila suffers from ‘the many ills of excessive street traffic’ (Boquet 2013, 45). The metropolis ranked second in the TomTom traffic index for 2019 for the worst urban congestion worldwide (2019). According to this ranking, Manila’s standing is at 71 percent congestion, which has made commuting worse. It remains an inimitable fact that a large population of people are left commuting via public transportation or via privately owned vehicles. To address this crisis the government has built the point-to-point (P2P) bus system as part of the country’s public utility bus modernization program (DOTr Latest News 2016) to alleviate some of Manila’s traffic and commuting issues between key areas of the megacity. I thus explore the challenges of commuting on public transport, engaging the ways in which the P2P has reshaped the commuting experience. I explore how the P2P is experienced by commuters, how it recalibrates their rhythms, the time they spend commuting, their pace and conditions of travel, their emotions and their manners of moving through the city. I evaluate the realities of commuting life, the hard work that comes with the everyday grind of the commute and the difference that the P2P makes in the commuter’s everyday lives by reshaping their rhythms. From Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis I draw three types of rhythms to frame the discussion and make sense of how the P2P bus’ intervention reshapes and recalibrates the commuter’s experiences and rhythms.