Category: Society

Family-run PBC Car Adapt makes cutting-edge wheelchair transport solutions more accessible to Filipinos

Gelzon de la Cruz

Transport is an ordeal to the wheelchair-bound. They can be independent, they struggle to be independent, in many cases had been fully independent before affliction or old age had assailed them. But the few centimeters putting a vehicle’s cabin on a different plane from pavement is what always brings them back to needing the intimate kindness of others.

There’s the innate altruism, of course, there’s always someone willing to help, some family member, friend, or even the occasional bystander suddenly beset with the impulse to assist although seldom having the knowledge how to. That isn’t really the problem. In fact, ironically and unfairly to those who would volunteer to help, it’s the readiness of good souls to help that’s the rub. Already disabled, them needing to be carried into and out of a vehicle, their presumption of such help, further and repeatedly hobbles their dignity.

This continuing ordeal for a mother was what pushed her children to set up PBC Car Adapt, Inc. in November 2003. Thrice weekly she had to go to hospital for therapy. A minimum of three times a week and each way, she braved having to be carried onto and off a vehicle seat, casually separated from a wheelchair that had become her legs.

The family found a solution, a system that objectified the process, replacing servile help with servo mechanics. The Carony wheelchair system offered a way to automate their mother’s boarding and disembarking from a vehicle, turning it into a pushbutton affair, empowering her with the ability to push that button herself.

The system centers on a modular wheelchair, its chair meant to be disengaged from the wheel chassis, and lifted and swivelled into or out of a vehicle. The chair-bound passenger no longer has to be separated from what is engineered to be a portable yet safe and comfortable car seat. And the system is brand-neutral—it could be installed in any number of automotive makes and models, in compact or larger vehicle types from sedans to SUVs.

The problem was that they couldn’t simply buy the gear off-the-shelf. They could purchase the equipment, sure, but it had to be installed in a vehicle by an exclusive distributor. At the time, there were no such distributors here and their only option was to buy both the vehicle and the wheelchair system abroad, have these mated there, and import the entire finished product into the country.

Fortunately, the family had the means but not the frivolousness to even consider such a course of action. Instead, with full appreciation of how the Carony wheelchair system could be as valuable to others as it was for them, they gave body to their conviction, incorporated PBC Car Adapt, and themselves became that elusive distributor that they needed to be here,  in-country.

They became the country distributor of Carony systems-maker Autoadapt of Sweden, making the Philippines only the second country in Asia, after Japan, to have gained this distributorship. Now, almost 14 years down the road, their product line up already includes equipment to make vehicles operable by paraplegic drivers, fitting these out with hands-only boarding and driving systems.

You could visit their source’s website at autoadapt.com to see the solutions they provide, or point your browser at pbccaradapt.ph and see how they’ve registered their domain name but haven’t gone all-in commercial with online retail. But if the wheelchair systems they carry sound to you like tangible solutions for a particular someone’s everyday ordeal, we suggest that you simply call their Quezon City office at +632 881 6664 or +632 455 5929.

Look for managing partner Juliet “Jet” Quiemel, daughter to the lady who started them down this road, or for Christine, the buoyant daughter and granddaughter to them both. Call and ask them about how they’ve matter-of-factly championed the cause of the disabled all these years. And, if you decide to get their help, say that you heard of them through Real World Drive and tell them that we endorse to you the modest referral fee they offered us … take it as a small discount, with our compliments.

Front/rear facing seats bring efficient and safer seating on jeepney-type rear bodies

Gelzon de la Cruz

Shouldn’t someone be working on this, this double-coach configuration for truck chassis rear-bodies that harks back to how passengers travelled in train cabins with front- and rear-facing couches?

Not a radical thing, not rocket science, a double-coach configuration simply takes the commonplace jeepney-type benches on trucks’ passenger rear bodies, bisects the front and rear halves and rotates each of these 90 degrees, and puts doors on the right side, the curbside of the cabin.

Result would be the same seating capacity as on a side-facing counterpart—a critical issue for school-bus operators who need as many revenue-earning seats as safely possible to stay afloat—and two doors where there used to be one, each one serving half the number of passengers as compared to before.

Double-coach with foldable benches could be configured for multiple applications, from school-bus or commuter, to long deck panel truck.

The value of this configuration—in light of regulatory initiatives for modern and safer passenger accommodations on school-buses as well as public utility jeepneys—hinges on government acceptance of rear-facing seats as being equivalent to front-facing ones. And these should be acceptable since rear-facing postures are considered safer than front-facing ones, and significantly enough for the manufacturers of child seats to instruct that these be mounted rear-facing to transport kids aged three years or younger.

Why GrabTrike is a good thing even if you don’t actually use it

Gelzon de la Cruz

The GrabTrike option on the Grab app could serve as your online resource for holding tricycles to the fare matrix that’s probably posted for public reference but only in locations familiar to locals. Regulated by local government units, tricycle fares are intended to be fair. That’s a given. But with no easy access, no quick read on what these fares ought to be, the commuter is basically at the mercy of the tricycle driver and the prices he may quote.

It’s something that comes with a learning curve, figuring out standard fare after several trips to similar points, over what seem like equivalent distances. But when you disembark from long haul transport and want to take the countryside’s equivalent to the city’s taxicabs, that’s when asking around for how much so-and-so costs becomes a big old canary—something that marks you as,  well, as a mark.

So, you usually just get in the trike, trying to look like a local, and then just ask how much fare is when you get at your destination, like it was just a lapse in memory. If the fare sounds exorbitant, you have the option of haggling and maybe making a scene, but you’re already behind the curve at that point.

Enter GrabTrike. Even if you end up not actually using the service, firing up the Grab app and thumbing in origin and destination points, will show you the estimated fare for your trip (add the P25 Grab fee if you want to actually book it, or save it if you don’t). Presto! You’ve got a number to work with.

Here a suggestion for going native: if you want to keep looking like a local, round off the number to the nearest P5. Say it like, “di ba P65 lang?!” if the driver looks like he’s trying to pull the wool over your eyes. Even if the right fare is pesos less, you get to leave behind a consolation tip.

So far, Grab has been able to deploy the service only in Pampanga. If you think about it, their efforts to represent obscure fare matrices with their simplifying algorithms are already a public service in itself. Here’s hoping they roll out GrabTrike in other locales as well, and soon.

And, come to think of it, the same argument can be said of GrabTaxi where taxicabs do ply city streets. Even if you don’t actually use the service, running their app and checking the estimated fare for your trip gives you a fair estimate, sans the booking fee, assuming traffic conditions stay generally the same from start to finish.

Quick note: what’s he doing, the man in red

Gelzon de la Cruz

A top editor once told me, “don’t worry if there’s other stuff, even people, in your shot … these could bring warmth.”  Well, on this 2015 shakedown drive to Sagada with the then new BAIC M20 MPV, the other stuff were not incidental, not just tolerated but caught deliberately, fortunately, in the composition. 

m20-on-halsema-highway-900

A picture, any picture, ought to tell a story all its own. There’s nuance, there’s atmosphere, there’s a notion of what comes after, all conveyed in life made still for endless scrutiny.  And, on the hardy M20 there’s even the odd pun to plumb:  people-mover in foreground, a person, and movement, in back.  I did warn you, a pun.

Seriously, though, the photo’s story is yours for the telling. There’s the M20–big, wide, metal sleek and placidly parked in the foreground. She’s pointedly stationary, as underscored by the van blurring by (an old L300 Versavan by the looks of her roofline), and she seems empty. Enter the man in red.  He’s not the main subject of the image, but his presence, his striding stance away from the scene, could somehow explain it.  You have to ask: Is he leaving or looking?

The actual narrative is explained by what he’s gazing at over his right shoulder.  It was the seventh hour of a drive that started at midnight, a push from Manila to Sagada to test the new MPV.  This scene finds us, a party of five passenger/drivers, on Halsema Highway and caught in the shadows of a mountain sunrise while those peaks to the west were already getting sunlight.

It was a serene moment on what was once considered, up to a handful of years ago, as one of the most dangerous roads in Asia (but is now a proud and well paved wonder). That guy in red, our car buddy, a well traveled engineer, had gotten the jump on us. We put the M20 on a lay-by to do what anyone would do in the situation … look for a spot to do a selfie.

 

Sidecar or armrest

Gelzon de la Cruz

Go beyond city limits and your taxicab go-anywhere option becomes the tricycle. They’re at the top of the food chain in the rural transport system. So you’d think they’d have more headroom for passengers. But, alas, the trend seems to be for lower, sleeker, claustrophobic sidecars.

Baguio Again

Gelzon de la CruzLeave a comment

I’ve been taught by my dad to feel out each car I drive, how to test it for the first few kilometers of a hundred kilometer trip. Seat-of-the-pants kind of drivers, that’s me and my Pop.

It was an open road back then, gas prices were low enough to make present numbers look science-fiction astronomical, and Pop even managed to get us curfew passes for those traffic-free night drives under Martial Law.

kennonroad-1918
There was a year when it seemed we were in Baguio every month. We had the good old Renault 5 back then, the LeCar under American marketing guise. It had a 1.1 liter back when 1600s and 1800s were the preferred displacements for going up Kennon.

That little old car was a delight, but the devil to maintain: no parts. So we’d go on the highway with everyone admonished not to move suddenly and cause the car to drift left or right, that’s how soft the aging shocks were. I remember being all stiff with hands staying at 10 and 2 o’clock on an imaginary steering wheel long after having arrived.

I was always apprehensive at the La Union gas station, before the approaches to the climb. Will he let me drive on? Or pull over, ostensibly for a pit-stop but really for a switch up, let him take the wheel for the half hour of hair-raising turns? On those occasions when he felt I passed muster, I’d drive, and drive like the mushy springed car was on rails.

Hug the curb, he’d always say, mind your revs–the banks on Kennon Road were always good enough to let me keep that precious momentum. And my Pop’s watchful gaze? You can’t imagine the satisfaction when he finally would relax, coming back alert only when we got to the Lion and then again when we were finally on the deceptively gentle but oh too long uphill road at the outskirts of the city.

On another trip, a later trip with me older, I went up in an old Ford Escort that had no fuel gauge, a temperamental carb, and no speedometer. The fuel thing I got around by sinking a dip-stick in the tank in Tarlac. The bad carb (which made the car guzzle fuel like it was water) I fixed by simply taking off the air filter. And the speedometer? My college buddies and I solved that by signing to the lead car in the convoy (no cell phones back then). “How fast are we going?” we signed to them in front. “Pretty fast!” they’d sign back.

So you see, after decades of all that, I never thought I’d be studying a car manual for a road-trip. But I am now. Two things to nail down for the trip: max-conserve parameters and forced downshifting on an automatic transmission.

The thing about fuel efficiency is obvious. With gas now ten times what it cost back then, I’ll be looking to save each liter of the green stuff (red back then), maybe not carry too much in the tank it’d be tantamount to hauling cargo instead of being fuelled up. Good thing Pop already has me trained in mileage marks. Allow 250 kilometers each way for Baguio, he’d always say. And he’d drill me on how much fuel I’ve bought, in liters, not pesos. Off the Internet I got the car’s specs (a loaner SUV from a good soul), and with Excel I’ll do my trip and load-out plan.

The downshifting is also obvious, at least to anyone who’s had to drive down from Baguio. You can’t ride the brakes going down, not unless you want them to overheat and turn into useless glowing discs. Half the burden you have to pass to friction from an engaged but throttled down engine. I’ve always driven a manual on those Baguio trips, got the down-shifting locked in muscle memory. But this trip is with a ‘matic and I have to understand the transmission’s analogue for my instinctive stick work. So now I finally understand the mechanics of D, D3, D2 and D1.

A bit much maybe for a weekend drive up to Baguio. But it’s been a while. The last time I was up there was before our first daughter … that would make it more than a decade. And, there’re the kids—three now—who’ll be making the trip for the first time. In fact, when I was last up there, Pop was still alive.

I know that my dad, that hardy one-legged driver of anything on wheels, would approve. “Those are my granddaughters you’ll be driving son, you damned well better be careful,” I can hear him saying. “Yes Pop,” I’d say, “and hey, happy birthday by the way, sorry I forgot to call … give my regards to Ayrton Senna up there when you get the chance.”

—o0o—

This story, originally posted at www.mediumelectric.com on April 2, 2014

For Generations to Come

Gelzon de la CruzLeave a comment

With several major stage-plays now showing in the metropolis, which one should you watch if you can see only one? Ask me and I’d say the more exclusive one, the one that demands knowledge of rarer context, the one that costs the most to comprehend and cherish. So yes, I’d say Rak of Aegis is the one you can’t miss.

I mean, to suffer a calamity that submerges entire lives in the waist-deep excrement of sprawling squalid cities, and then to persevere with smiles, laughter and turns at the karaoke mike, well that’s something very few in the whole world can claim doing—something you wouldn’t wish on just anybody, as a matter of fact. A narrative punctuated with the soaring emotions possible only through song, you know you’re getting the most out of the show when you tear up, often because of laughter, and so many times because of remembered anguish.

You know you’re getting the most out of the show when you hear both despair and hope in the phrase, “tayo na lang ang magtulungan.” So, like I told the good folks performing at PETA today, this the last day of their regular run, the show simply can’t end, not yet, and not for a very long time. It has to be seen on-stage by my kids, and then by their kids after that.

—o0o—

This story, originally posted at www.mediumelectric.com on March 9, 2014