On Commuting, part III

Good evening my dirty little city.

The thought of doing a local version of Adam Savage, Jamie Hyneman, Katie Byron, Grant Imahara, and Tory Bellici’s series came into my mind again while I was staring blankly at the huge gaping pothole left by the Metro Manila Development Authority beside the Citybank Building sidewalk on Eastwood Libis.

If you might recall, I think I did one such thing some time ago when I tried to test the myth that your streetwise barkers, those clingy raggedy peons who shout public transport destinations (see On Commuting, pt. 2),could fill a bucket with coins from their daily earnings (amounting to about Php 500.00 / day). It was statistically found (through T-test analysis), that one could indeed reach that quota, but also to effortlessly go over it.

That particular experiment could use an update because I came to the realization that a perspective check was in place (see On Commuting, pt. 1). Barkers indeed do not serve their primary purpose of helping you find the jeepneys, FX, or whatnot, because that’s simply a stupid reason. We’re not friggin’ blind.Barkers persist to thrive in the complicated microeconomy of public transportation because it serves a useful (presumed) purpose of helping to market specific public utility vehicles for random passengers to choose them for others. Now that I’ve thought about it, barkers tend to raise the probability (again all under a presumption) of a specific jeep to be chosen and ridden by random passengers.

Using an experimental model, with the barker as the dependent variable, and during a one-shot week long data collection to get the mean daily earnings of a jeepney driver (taking into consideration the variable that a jeepney driver tips a barker of about 3-10 pesos, whenever a barker attracts a passenger, regardless of him successfully attracting one or many, the variable of mean daily fuel consumption, the variable of mean daily food consumption, and the variable of mean daily bribe money), three questions are being raised:

1. Is there a difference between the mean daily earnings of a jeepney driver when aided by a barker, and one without?
2. In the finding that there is indeed a difference, is the difference enough to say that it is significantly beneficial / significantly detrimental to the jeepney driver?
3. In the finding that there is indeed a difference, what is the difference between the probability of a random passenger choosing a public utility vehicle without the aid of a barker, and one with?

Ahh, the questions in life that could change the world. =)