Should EVs REALLY be exempted from traffic coding schemes?
CRYPTODAY 145
With the EDSA Rehabilitation project kicking off in a few weeks, a new odd-even traffic scheme is set to be implemented to reduce the volume of cars on the nation’s most popular thoroughfare. This aggressive new policy has drawn a lot of fire from motorists — it’s complicated and inconvenient — but it’s also thrown an unwanted spotlight on one exempted category: EVs. Now, I'm not gonna lie, coding exemption was one of my reasons for switching to EVs fully back in 2023. The EVIDA law of 2022 encourages the adoption of EVs by exempting them from traffic schemes and allocating parking slots for them in malls, as well as giving dealers a reduced tax obligation. (The free electricity was also a plus!)
To be frank, I've never been a fan of these traffic schemes, and owning an EV just allowed me to avoid them in a legitimate way. Global outcomes have shown that these schemes have not really done a very good job of alleviating traffic. What happens instead is that households are incentivized to accumulate more cars by not selling their old one (their "coding car") when buying a new one. The net effect is that the vehicular volume on the roads are the same, but the number of older, heavier carbon emitters increase. One would argue that is the opposite of what the traffic scheme was attempting to fix.
We can see the ineffectiveness of the current traffic scheme in EDSA’s own statistics: The ideal daily capacity for our nation’s main highway is only about 250,000 cars, but after 30 years of coding scheme enforcement, it currently sees … over 450,000 cars. The aggressive new odd-even traffic scheme that goes live in mid-June is basically attempting to drop that volume down to about half, i.e., the ideal amount of cars 😅 But it has generated a ton of anger amongst motorists, and at least some of that anger has been directed towards the EV exemption. The arguments range from emotional (“EVs are for the elite”) to the tangential (“we should be fixing public transportation instead of focusing on better cars”). But like a lot of online outrage, it's pretty misplaced. This new EDSA scheme will not singlehandedly impact EV sales, and neither will it be causing silent, odor-less EV traffic jams on EDSA.
Let's look at the numbers! On average there are about 150,000 new cars purchased in Metro Manila each year, so over the 2 years of EDSA rehabilitation we can expect 300,000 new cars to start plying these roads. How many EVs do we expect within that same period? There are currently only 15,000 EVs registered across the entire country, with the majority of them purchased over the last 18 months. (In case you’re curious, my estimate for Tesla units sold is around 800.) Because of the growing availability of charging stations here, we can assume that roughly 80% of those EVs are here in Metro Manila. We can also assume that the adoption curve will accelerate over time — perhaps 30,000-40,000 EV purchases in NCR over the next 2 years of EDSA rehab.
Now, 40,000 EVs over the next two years might sound like a lot, and since these will all be coding-exempt, it sounds like we could be potentially creating a monster of a traffic jam on EDSA. However, this is also not likely to happen, because not all of them will actually use EDSA. There are currently over 3 million registered cars in Metro Manila, but as we already know, only 450,000 vehicles travel on EDSA every day. We can use that same ratio (7:1) to evaluate the impact of those 40,000 new EVs. What we end up with is an estimated 6,000 EVs using EDSA daily.
Bottom line: by 2027, EVs will likely only account for 1.5% to 2.5% of EDSA’s current load. This number is small enough that it won’t measurably affect traffic congestion. Should they repeal the exemption for EVs anyway? I feel like it won’t matter either way, as it takes a lot more than a traffic exemption to uproot these legacy consumer habits. There will always be a minority of online critics who will call for fairness for all vehicles, and there will always be another minority that will advocate for greener policies. At the end of the day, it’ll take hundreds of separate decisions to solve the traffic problem, and focusing on the exemption debate alone won’t get us there.