Mass transit to clear Manila's traffic mess The Philippines government has turned to the private sector to improve chaotic conditions, says Barun Roy Fifteen years after Manila launched its first elevated mass transit railway to cope with its notoriously bad road traffic, a second elevated system went into operation in December 1999. And two more projects are hot on the anvil.
With a population of 10 million, metropolitan Manila is a massive sprawl of six cities and 11 municipalities, where traffic conditions are among the worst in Asia. Its 4,820 km of public and private roads aren't enough for the 1.3 million vehicles that use them. What makes matters worse is that private cars, accounting for 75 per cent of all vehicles, carry only 30 per cent of some 20 million person-trips that occur in the National Capital Region every day. The rest of the load falls on buses and jeepneys (converted jeeps that ply on feeder routes).
But public transportation is woefully inadequate, and new car registration in Manila is increasing by some 2,500 a month, which further clogs the roads. The government fears the situation will worsen when the mega city's population reaches 14.5 million by 2015, and is convinced that mass transit systems are the only practical answer to the mega city's traffic mess.
Light Rail Transit 1, or LRT 1, as the first system is called, is a showpiece from the Marcos era. The 15 km government-owned line, running above a heavily congested north-south corridor along Rizal and Taft avenues and carrying some 4,00,000 passengers daily, has indeed proved its usefulness many times over. But the government hasn't dared expand it because the low-fare system has been a budget sucker. So, when a group of private investors, including Ayala Land and Fil-Estate Management, came up with a proposal to build a second mass transit system for Metro Manila under a 25-year lease-and-transfer agreement, the government grabbed it. It has allowed the consortium to set its own fares and has decided that all similar projects in future will be undertaken in partnership with the private sector.
Called mass rail transit, or MRT, the second system is a 17 km elevated line that runs above Metro Manila's main north-south transport corridor, Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA). Begun in 1996 and already three-quarters open, it stretches from North Avenue in Quezon City to Taft Avenue in Pasay City, where it will link up with LRT 1.
At full operation, 60 air-conditioned trains, made in Czechoslovakia, will run the length at 2.5-minute to 3-minute intervals, carrying between 6,00,000 and 1 million passengers every day. It will, thus, absorb up to half the 2 million commuters who pass along EDSA each day.
As the EDSA MRT nears completion, work on a new privately promoted mass transit line has started to serve some of the densest northern and northeastern areas of the metropolis. The proposed 13.8 km line will link LRT 1 at one end, intersect the EDSA MRT at Cubao, and end up in Pasig, a booming residential and commercial area. When the first trains on this line start running by 2001, they will carry 40,000 to 60,000 passengers hourly in each direction.
At the same time, financing arrangements are being wrapped up for a major 27 km extension of LRT 1 to link a high-growth industrial region to the south, known as Calabarzon. Expected to be ready by 2003, it will be able to carry some 5,55,000 people every day along a corridor that over a million people travel through.
When these two projects are ready, Metro Manila will have a fairly extensive interconnected grid of elevated commuter railways, with the EDSA MRT as the backbone. The authorities believe this basic network will easily take half the mega city's more than 9,000 buses off the road, and even encourage car owners to use it for routine purposes, like going to work. To ease up the congestion further, provincial long-distance bus companies that have terminals in the city have been asked to move them away to less-crowded locations.