Motor-lugging Taxi Drivers of The Philippines
Two of my biggest pet-peeves of The Philippes have to do with taxis. One is the pervasive concept they have of fuel efficient driving. On a five-speed manual transmission, taxi drivers here routinely shift to 4th gear at 30 kph (18.5 mph), and into 5th gear at 40 kph (24.5 mph). They always stay below the powerband. When the motor stops lugging that means it’s time to shift to the next gear. Rarely do you see one of these vehicles exceed 1000 RPM.
When in a line of slow traffic, moving at 20 mph or so, they’ll move out to the other lane as if to pass, but if it does not appear they have ten or more seconds to make the pass, they just fall back in line. A simple shift to 2nd gear and a full accelerator would zip them around the impediment in less than 2 seconds, but it never crosses their mind.
I had one taxi driver that drove very near to normal (for an American), he stayed in the powerband the whole time, though at the low end of it, downshifting appropriately and never letting the motor lug. My fare was less than P100 (~$2), and while I never spoke while he was driving, upor arrival at my destination I gave him P200 and told him he was the best driver I’d seen in The Philippines and to never let anyone tell him how to drive. I miss that guy.
The second peeve is the airconditioning settings in taxis. Taxi drivers point the vents at themselves, and being Filipinos, acclimated to this tropical, humid weather, they get chilled easily. I generally ride in the back seat, so I can sit with my wife, and the vents just don’t blow very hard to the back. My ancestry is Northern European, and I perspire profusely in this hot clime. Trying to get a taxi driver to point his vents to the back seat and turn his fan speed up is always a difficult assignment. I’ve found it easiest to begin by apologizing profusely for being a weak Northerner, to try to elicit some sympathy for my dreadful plight, for my being so geographically out of place, before asking for their help.
For long taxi rides of 15 minutes or more I will generally check the air conditioning output first and then negotiate with the driver to keep the settings on high. I will sometimes pass on a cab that does not have cool enough output. One useful and humorous challenge to them is to ask them to try to make my nipples hard. This generally gets a chuckle and establishes a friendlier relationship.
One reason I like Cagayan de Oro City so much more than Cebu City is that 90% of Cebu taxis are old cars with 100,000+ miles on them, whereas half the taxis in CdO are less than two years old. The airconditioning in these new cars is much better than in the old ones, and the new suspensions and intact door weather seals make for a much nicer ride. Filipinos rarely tip taxi drivers. I almost always do. The more they cooperate with my peculiar demands, the more they get. If my glasses fog up when leaving the taxi, that demands an extra large tip.