Palace spokesman Salvador Panelo accepted the challenge and immersed himself in the misery and agony of enduring what many ordinary Filipinos have to go through. In social science research, we call this methodology participant observation. It is a data-gathering method used by qualitative researchers. While some people may claim that the method is prone to bias, it nevertheless provides the researcher with authentic data drawn from a naturalistic setting. Its power, however, rests on an openness on the part of the participant observer to base his or her insights on what was actually observed and experienced. In the case of Panelo, instead of using the experience as a basis for a fair assessment of what commuters have to endure, he gave it a spin to support his biases. He concluded that what we have is only a traffic crisis, and not a transport crisis.