Davao City rolls out modern buses
Published Dec 5, 2025 02:44 pm
DRIVER Lloyd Sumbo and passengers onboard a modern bus in Davao City. (Keith Bacongco)
DAVAO CITY – The Davao City Interim Bus Service formally rolled on the streets of this city on Friday, Dec. 5, to help ease the growing need for public transportation options during peak hours.
An initial 10 modern buses started ferrying passengers for free from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. in north and southbound routes.
City Administrator Tristan Dwight Domingo acknowledged that the DC Buses will help ease the shortage of public transportation during peak hours.
Domingo, who also heads the Davao bus project, said the initial run of the DC Buses on Friday morning went smoothly.
Two days before the formal launching, the DC Buses underwent a dry run in their designated routes, he said.
DC Bus will also serve as a sweeper transport service complementary to the existing Peak Hours Augmentation Bus System (PHABS) and Public Utility Jeepneys (PUJs), according to the City Information Office.
The city government has identified 124 bus stops that support safe loading and unloading on city’s streets.
According to the city government, DC Buses' staging point is along Roxas Ave.
From Roxas Ave., buses ferry passengers as far as Mintal, Panacan, and Toril.
Domingo said that identification of the initial routes were based on the data gathered during the preparation period.
He said that DC Buses could not yet serve further than the current routes due to the limited number of buses.
"Those who are asking why the buses could not yet serve farther areas like Lasang, Calinan, and Mandug because we only have a limited number of buses for now," Domingo said over a city government-run radio station.
To fully serve the farthest communities of the city, he added that it would require about 800 to 1,000 buses.
DC Bus driver Lloyd Sumbo said that the buses are faster than the jeepneys.
"Unlike jeepneys, buses will strictly load and unload passengers in designated bus stops. Jeepneys are time consuming because they often stop to pick up or unload passengers," said Sumbo, who was a jeepney driver for 14 years.
For instance, the 43-year-old driver said it would take a jeepney about an hour-and-half from Panacan to Roxas Ave. depending on the traffic.
"In DC Bus, it would only take less than an hour. A Roxas-Panacan-Roxas roundtrip would only take a little over an hour. Big difference," Sumbo said in local dialect.
The buses are 12-meter long low-entry equipped with an intelligent bus fleet system.
Each of them can carry up to 90 passengers with 46 seating capacity, two seats reserved for Persons with Disability (PWDs), senior citizens and pregnant women, and at least 15 standing passengers, the CIO said in its briefer.