Traffic: Is relief in sight?

What to do about traffic relief has become so muddled that transport officials are so shell shocked to do anything. Let me try to bring everything into perspective since I have been covering this for decades.

 Manila had the best organized and efficient mass transit system in the region when my late father was growing up. They had the tranvia. By the time I came around, we had the jeep and bus lines that are privately owned.

 It wasn’t so bad then because the population wasn’t as big as now. I could leave our house in Paco by bus at 6:30 a.m., go to Quiapo to pick up the JD bus to UP Diliman and catch my 7:30 a.m. class. Seems like eons ago.

When I was covering Manila City Hall in 1970, Mayor Antonio Villegas wanted to build a monorail. I reported it. Nothing happened.

During the Marcos years, the LRT-1 came about. Then FVR gave the sweetheart deal for MRT-3. LRT-2 followed. But the key mass transport is MRT-3

The private owners led by the Sobrepenas of College Assurance Plans (CAP), Ayala Land, Ramcar, Greenfield Development of Unilab, Anglo Philippines Holdings and a few others had a great deal going for them. They had a guaranteed income from government. It didn’t matter that Erap pegged the fare at a point too low to recover cost of operations.

Government was responsible for operations. The Sobrepena consortium was a rent collecting landlord. The consortium bailed out on their economic interest by issuing bonds backed by the guaranteed government rental. But the consortium retained ownership.

Soon there was trouble because MRT-3 was not being maintained well. That was supposed to be the business of the landlord, but government took it on and messed up.

The PNoy administration made a series of bad decisions we are paying for up to now. They awarded maintenance contracts to political allies who were only interested in the fees, with zero knowledge of what to do.

Then PNoy’s Jun Abaya awarded the purchase of new rail cars to a Chinese company that didn’t follow the specs required. So, the Dalian railcars are not being used and P3.8 billion of the people’s money wasted. Under the MRT-3 contract, the Sobrepena consortium, like any landlord, was supposed to be responsible for capex like new train cars.

Come the Duterte administration. They dilly dallied on what to do with MRT-3, the Dalian trains and the still legal owners, the Sobrepena consortium.

Finally, they moved and negotiated a deal with JICA to hire back Sumitomo to fix MRT-3. Good move. Mar Roxas erred in firing Sumitomo, in the first place.

MRT-3 facilities need a lot of fixing. The rails are falling apart, which explains why the trains are running at reduced speed. The electrical lines, the communication facilities and other technical stuff need upgrading too.

Sumitomo will take care of all that. But under the JICA agreement with Sumitomo and DOTr, Sumitomo will only bring back MRT-3 to the point when their contract expired in 2009. No new train cars and they don’t want to have anything to do with the Dalian train cars. I imagine the guarantee will cease if DOTr uses the heavier Dalian cars.

That means running 22 trains per hour by 2021, which was the level in 2009. In short, no capacity increase after 12 years! After all the huffing and puffing and wild anticipation, we are not going to be better off in 2021 than when PNoy took over.

MRT-3 is important. It has a current daily ridership of around 560,000 passengers. It is operating significantly above its designed capacity of about 380,000 passengers per day. Stalling is frequent. Lines to ride it are kilometric.

Any solution to our traffic problems requires a mass transit system like the MRT-3, particularly on EDSA. Everything else can be considered band-aid solutions.

What can be done right away?

Forget the subway. That requires five years or more, and most subway constructions go well beyond promised delivery dates.

The only thing I can see that mimics a mass transit system is the BRT that San Miguel proposes to run on top of the Skyway from Balintawak to Susana Heights. The Skyway Stage 3 project, long delayed, will be delivered by January 2020.

Hopefully, SMC gets the permit to run their BRT by now so they can start procuring the facilities needed. Commuters from Bulacan, Caloocan, and parts of Quezon City to Makati will get an alternative mass transport system to MRT-3.

Incidentally, the opening of the Skyway Stage 3 to vehicular traffic this January is also said to be capable of reducing EDSA traffic by 50 percent.

The other thing that DOTr can do quickly is fix the bus franchises on EDSA and come up with a Network Bus System. This is a low hanging fruit. The bus operators are said to be willing to cooperate because they are making less and less trips due to traffic.

The logjam here is LTFRB, the same agency responsible for granting too many bus franchises that’s now at the root of our problem.

Maybe there are legal hurdles to surmount, so it may be a good idea for Sen. Grace Poe to give them emergency power to do this. Rep. Edgar Mary Sarmiento, who heads the House transportation committee, once called me to express support for the solution.

Once reorganized, the buses will start operating with a system similar to Uber/Grab. No transfer of asset ownership, but an integrated dispatching of buses, in response to varying demand during the day and at sections of the route. Such a system could be set up in six to 12 months.

Beyond these two projects, everything else is a pipe dream… including the 10-lane elevated expressway over EDSA proposed by San Miguel.

DOTr should just focus on the Skyway BRT and the EDSA bus system integration. Those are the only two possible sources of relief in the next two to three years.

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco