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Did You Know?

31 December 1844 Did Not Happen in the Philippines

Jeepneys make up about 2% of the registered vehicles in Metro Manila. According to the city's own traffic authority they account for 2.3% of daily traffic, against 43.75% for private cars.

They carry roughly 40% of all motorised journeys in the Philippines — around 40 million person-trips a day.

In Metro Manila alone, one study put daily jeepney ridership at close to 9 million people. A JICA study found jeepneys accounted for 39% of all public transport in the capital region, or 6.8 million trips. The base fare is about fifteen US cents.

There are roughly 200,000 jeepneys in the Philippines, with somewhere between 42,000 and 55,000 in Metro Manila depending on whether you count registered franchises or all vehicles in service. Each carries about twenty passengers.

The arithmetic is worth sitting with. Two per cent of the vehicles. Two per cent of the traffic. Forty per cent of the journeys.

The reason is that most people do not have the alternative: only about 12% of Metro Manila residents own a private car. Congestion in the capital has been estimated to cost the country around USD 67 million a day — over USD 24 billion a year, around 7% of national GDP at the time — and the vehicles blamed for it are largely not the ones carrying the people.

The clock: Manila has a history of adjusting the system rather than the reality.

Nobody was born in the Philippines on 31 December 1844. Nobody died, nobody married, nothing was recorded, and no sun rose. The date was removed from the calendar by decree.

The reason goes back to Magellan. Sailing west around the world, his expedition lost a few minutes a day — travelling with the sun, each day ended slightly later than it did for the people they had left in Europe. By the time they reached the Philippines, their calendar was a day behind that of Asians who reckoned their dates from the west, and nobody corrected it.

Because the colony was administered across the Pacific from Spanish America, it simply kept that western-hemisphere date. So for 323 years, the Philippines was a day behind its own neighbours. While it was Sunday in Manila, it was Monday in Batavia — modern Jakarta — a few days' sail away.

The error was known for centuries. Nobody got round to fixing it.

Then Mexico became independent in 1821, the Manila–Acapulco trade wound down, and commerce with China and the rest of Asia became the thing that mattered. Being a day out from your trading partners stopped being an eccentricity and started being a problem.

On 16 August 1844, Governor-General Narciso Clavería y Zaldúa, with the agreement of the Archbishop of Manila, decreed that Tuesday 31 December 1844 would be deleted. Monday 30 December 1844 was followed directly by Wednesday 1 January 1845.

It is worth noticing how this differs from Rome.

When Pope Gregory removed ten days in 1582, he was correcting an accumulated drift, and the reform was carefully designed to leave the weekday cycle untouched — Thursday was still followed by Friday. Nobody lost a Sunday.

Manila was doing something else entirely. It was not correcting a drift; it was stepping across the International Date Line. So the Philippines skipped a date and a weekday: there was no Tuesday that week.

The Date Line itself has never been fixed by international agreement; even the International Meridian Conference of 1884 left it undefined. By then Manila had been on the correct side of it for forty years, having got there first, alone, and without asking anybody.