Car Talk

I think this car was trying to say something.

Crazy Drivers

If you were going down along Tomas Morato from E. Rodriguez towards Timog, you would cross Roces Avenue at some point. This is the corner MacGyver and I fondly call the "crazy driver" corner.

The term came about because he was driving Mother home one day and they were stopped at this particular corner. The light was green but MacGyver was waiting for the left turn light to turn green and signal permission for him to turn into Roces. Admittedly, he considered making the left since there were no approaching cars but hesitated because Mother was in the car with him. As he was contemplating his next move, several jeepneys turned left ahead of him in spite the red left turn arrow.

"Look at those crazy drivers!" my mother exclaimed as she saw the jeeps disregard the stop light.

MacGyver was quiet and thanked his lucky stars that he had not opted to run the red light that day. Truth is he hardly ever runs the red lights but he DOES like to go at the split second after the lights turn from red to green. I think even THAT would have caused Mother's heart to skip a beat. At least his prudence spared him the title of being a 'crazy driver' that day.

So whenever we are in that corner, waiting for the left turn light to turn green, he would ask me, "Shall I be a crazy driver today?"

My answer would always be 'NO.'

I thought that my answer would always be NO because I thought that the question would always be asked by MacGyver. However today, the crazy driver question was for RD and MyGirl to ask. They didn't exactly ask if they could be crazy drivers for the day but they may as well have.

They wanted to go go-karting today ... and the answer was 'YES!'

Go-karting was the highlight of our trip to Subic for RD and MyGirl. We were fortunate to have some sun that day and that the Go-Kart place was operational. Yesterday, when MacGyver, RD and MyGirl had checked the place, they found it to be closed. Apparently many of the employees were unable to report to work due to the heavy rains and the flood.

The last time we'd gone up to Subic, GI and RD were able to drive the go-karts by themselves but MyGirl was in the car with MacGyver as they raced around the tracks. This time around, MyGirl was on her own. She was given a smaller sized go-kart which allowed her feet to reach the pedals.


RD went on the tracks ahead.

He had gone around at least once when MyGirl started her ten rounds.



RD overtook MyGirl three or four times since he was driving much faster than his sister was. (Crazy driver!)


It was obvious that he was having fun. When he was motioned to stop since he'd gone around his alloted ten times, instead of decelerating slowly he banked to the right and screeched to a halt. When he got out, he was one happy, crazy driver.

MyGirl had about five or six more rounds to go when RD was done.


So we watched as she happily went around the tracks. When she was on her eight or ninth round, it started to drizzle. I wondered if the rain would bother MyGirl or if it would cause her to forgo her last few rounds. But NOOOO! She was having too much fun. (Rain? Hogwash!)





When she finally pressed on the brakes and got off the go-kart, I knew I had one more excited, little (hopefully not-so-crazy) driver in the family.

Here are the latest addition to the crazy drivers in our family.

P.S. Even their young cousin Ronald could tell that RD was a crazy driver. He noted that RD was driving faster than MyGirl.

Coding Day

Many years back, the government implemented the coding scheme to minimize the traffic on the road. They called it the UNIFIED VEHICULAR VOLUME REDUCTION PROGRAM which affected both private and public utility vehicles. Depending on the last digit of one's license plate, the vehicle would not be allowed on the roads of Metro Manila during certain times of the day in particular days of the week. Coding was from 7 am to 7 pm. Those with plates ending in '1' and '2' were not allowed on the road from 7 am to 7 pm on Mondays, '3' and '4' were not allowed on Tuesdays, '5' and '6' on Wednesdays, '7' and '8' on Thursdays, and '9' and '0' on Fridays. There is a window from 10 am to 3 pm for some cities (excluding San Juan and Makati) for private vehicles where they can be on the road regardless of their plate ending.

When they first implemented the coding scheme, Saturdays were also included in the schedule. Cars with license plates ending in odd numbers were not allowed in the morning, while those with even numbers were not allowed on the road in the afternoon. I don't remember the cut-off times anymore; maybe it was 7 am to 12 noon and 12 noon to 5 pm.

Anyway, the coding scheme did help minimize the cars on the road a bit. It encouraged (or should I say forced) some people to commute. It certainly brought a lot more people to the office much earlier on certain days. There was renewed interest in car pooling. People would be hitching rides or going off together in one car on certain days because their cars were banned. I remember we had Storm during this initial implementation making Thursday our car ban day.

Eventually the government decided that Saturday traffic was tolerable and they lifted the coding for Saturdays. It was free for all! That was a great relief, especially for people doing overtime, I suppose. Imagine wanting to do half-day of overtime work but having to spend the whole day at the office simply because your car is not allowed on the road in the afternoon. (Of course the upside of the matter would be, imagine wanting to do half-day at the mall but having to spend the whole day there simply because your car is not allowed on the road on the other half of the day. What a sacrifice!)

(I recall what MacGyver's sister, Sky, told me when she and her family visited home from China last July. She said that in preparation for the 2008 Olympics, sort of like a Clean Air Act, the Chinese government had implemented odd-even car ban there. If I am not mistaken, cars with odd number license plate endings were not allowed on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays; then those with even number license plate endings were not allowed on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Yes, the cars were banned from the streets of Beijing for the WHOLE day. Eventually, they realized that having whole day car bans was not very smart. People could not go for late night activities because the car they arrived in would not be allowed on the road after midnight. If someone had to be picked up from the airport towards midnight, sure they would get picked up, but if the flight was delayed or they happened stay longer and they found themselves still at the airport after 12, they would be stuck there for a day. So the government wisened up and provided a short window from 12 mn to 3 am where everyone was allowed on the road.)

The coding scheme in the Philippines affected not only the cars on the road but also the cars about to go on the road. Prior to this, when people bought new cars they didn't care what license plates they were given. The license number was just a bunch of letters and numbers. However, with the implementation of the coding scheme, the number on one's license plate was his ticket to a flexible Friday date or a sentence for a long day at the office on a Thursday.

It also encouraged people (who could afford it) to have a second car. Of course it is totally beyond me why some people would go for a second car with exactly the same coding ending scheme as their main vehicle. (Face palm!)

When we were faced with the choice of a license plate ending for our new car (that would have been Eeyore), I remember that we just asked that the license plate ending not be '9' or '0.' (As if we had somewhere to go on Fridays, right?) We had been using a Tuesday coding car (Classic) at that time and said that the Tuesday ban was fine with us. So in the end, we retained our scheduled Tuesday coding.

Back then, if you were buying a new car and needed to select the license plate ending, it was simply a matter of deciding which day you wanted to go to work early and stay out late. However in this day and age, all of that has changed and we have no other than President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo to thank for that. She started this trend of moving holidays. She figured if the holiday fell smack in the middle of the week, work is interrupted; whereas if the holiday were MOVED to either Monday or Friday, the people would have a long weekend. Long weekends encourage people to go on vacations and trips they would not otherwise have the opportunity to take. There are lots of nice places within the Philippines for vacations or trips. This long weekend thing could do wonders for our tourism. Let's move all our holidays around, she declared.

(During the early days of the holiday shifting, there were a lot of last minute holiday declarations. Not everybody realizes the implications of such matters on businesses with systems that need to have their holiday tables set in advance. The stock trading settlement followed a T+3 standard. Whenever GMA moved the holiday, there were manual adjustments that had to be made to ensure that hand-off files contained the correct data. For our Government Securities dealership business, system generated maturity transactions were not to be automatically credited to the account holders since the bank was merely the collecting and paying agent. It was hard on us that had systems and operations to monitor.)

In fairness to GMA, she has finally learned to announce holidays in advance and has figured out which holidays she can and should not move. She once moved Labor Day out of May 01 and had the workers up in arms. She would move Christmas and your birthday if she had a choice.

Given all this hullabaloo about holidays, MacGyver has figured that the best coding day is Monday. Why? Because between Monday and Friday, there is a greater chance that the holiday will be moved to Monday since some places have work on Saturdays. Now if your car is banned on Mondays but Monday is declared a holiday, that means you can use your car on Monday since coding is not in effect during holidays. In other words, for that particular week, owners of cars ending in '1' or '2' are able to drive around every single day of that week. (Smart, right?)

So both Nightwing and QuickSilver are Monday coding cars. This has worked well for us thanks to MacGyver's great powers of deduction (and those superstitious people who prefer plates like '888' or '168.') Last month there were two holidays which fell on Monday. We were happy for the holidays and the extra weekday our car was allowed on the road.


According to Wikipedia, '168' is considered one of the luckiest numbers in Chinese culture. '168' in Chinese means road to prosperity, continue being prosperous, prosperous all the way or prosperous together. (I think you get the picture.) Other lucky numbers are '138' or '148' meaning prosperous for life; '338' and '448' mean prosperous for generations.