Ride-hailing service Grab Philippines asked the Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board to ease the regulatory requirements for transportation network vehicle service applicants to plug the supply gaps.
Grab Philippines senior director for pperations Ronald Roda said in a news briefing that despite the additional TNVS slots, filling up the actual cars is “difficult” due to requirements and lengthy applications process.
“We’re asking [LTFRB] for changes,” Roda said.
Roda said that since the opening of the additional 4,000 slots for TNVS on Jan. 9, less than a thousand of TNVS applicants were approved.
“Assuming you [LTFRB] ease up requirements, we would increase our capacity,” Roda said.
The LTFRB earlier this month announced the additional 100,000 slots for Grab to address the increasing demand for TNVS in the country.
Roda said there is enough demand for the fresh supply of TNVS which breached the pre-pandemic level.
Data from Grab showed that daily bookings in Greater Metro Manila exceeded the existing supply of ride-hailing drivers, with Grab serving less than half of the passenger demand volume in December.
“We estimate that the number of slots required for catering to demand in 2023 for new and existing cities is close to 100,000 TNVS licenses mentioned by the LTFRB in their last statement. For Greater Metro Manila, this simply brings us back to the 65,000 supply cap levels pre-pandemic,” Roda said.
“Our aspiration is to get GMM supply back to early 2020 supply levels. For the provinces, an estimate of 35,000 TNVS licenses takes into consideration forecasts based on population size that can be converted into the total addressable market as well as the activity levels of the current driver pool in December 2022,” he said.