The Map Has 26 Jeepney Routes

I went to count how Metro Manila gets around. I ended up counting something else.

The Number That Stopped Me

OpenStreetMap is a map anyone can add to. Volunteers draw the roads, mark the stops, trace the routes. It is free and it is often very good.

I asked it how many bus routes Metro Manila has. It said 803.

Then I asked how many jeepney routes. It said 26.

Twenty-six. You have probably ridden more than twenty-six different jeepney routes in your life.

So the map does not have the jeepneys. It has 31 bus routes for every jeepney route, in a city where jeepneys are everywhere and buses are not.

Which Things Get Written Down

Then I looked at the trains. And the trains are all there.

6 lines. 49 stations. Every single station has a name on it.

Think about what makes a train easy to map. It sits still. It has a company that owns it. It has a printed timetable and a website. Somebody can look it up.

Now think about a jeepney route. It exists because drivers drive it. The signboard on the windshield is the schedule. There is no page to look it up on. To map it you have to ride it, or ask someone who does.

So the map is not lazy. It is just much easier to record the neat things than the messy ones. And the messy ones are what most of us actually ride.

That is the whole page, really. The gap is not a flaw in the data. The gap is the data.

Where The Mapping Went

The same thing shows up between cities.

Quezon City has 1,219 stops on the map. Pateros has 23.

Quezon City and Manila together hold 49.7 out of every 100 mapped stops in the whole metro. Two cities out of 17.

Some of that is real — Quezon City is huge. But not 53 times huger than Pateros.

Even the small details split the same way. When someone maps a route they can add who runs it. 90.0 out of 100 bus routes have that. Only 42.3 out of 100 jeepney routes do.

The Mistake I Almost Published

Here is one I nearly missed.

I asked the map for the stops in each city, one city at a time, by name. San Juan came back with 948 stops.

San Juan is the smallest city in Metro Manila. You can walk across it. 948 stops would be more than Manila.

The number sat in my chart looking completely normal. Nothing crashed. Nothing was empty. It just quietly did not make sense, and only because I happen to know San Juan is small.

So I dug in. There are six places called San Juan with an official boundary in the map. One here. One in Negros Oriental. One in Batangas. And one each in Puerto Rico, Honduras, and El Salvador.

My question said "San Juan" and the map helpfully added them all together. Puerto Rico has a proper bus network.

The fix was to stop using names. Every city now gets looked up by its own ID number, and I saved that number in the file so you can check which boundary I used.

I also added a rule that shouts if any one city ever holds more than half the metro's stops. That is what the bug looked like, so now it cannot come back quietly.

What I Left Out

The old page had charts of how many people ride, which routes are busiest, where people transfer, and how far apart stops sit.

I cannot do any of that honestly. Two reasons.

One, this map has shapes, never passengers. It knows where a stop is, not who stands at it.

Two, and worse: with only 26 of thousands of jeepney routes, anything I calculated about "busiest corridors" would be describing which routes got mapped. Not which routes are busy.

A confident number about a network that is mostly missing is worse than no number. So there are none.