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Thursday, March 28, 2024

MRT: The cost of incompetence

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In developed cities like Japan, New York, Hong Kong and some in Europe, everyone takes mass transit. I visited my daughter when she lived in New York and I saw stock brokers, lawyers, doctors, nurses, blue-collar workers all riding the New York subway. Ease and convenience in commuting blurs the divide between social and economic classes. Effective mass transit is a social equalizer. Rich or poor, no one wants to agonize inside a car for hours on end if there is a reliable and comfortable way to get around the city. No one.

Metro Manila’s commuting public relies heavily on the MRT and the LRT. To our detriment, metro railways are a big disappointment, in large part, due to inefficiency. Per the 2016 COA report, the MRT-3 operations alone encountered 2,619 train removals, 63 service interruptions, and 586 incidents of passenger unloading. Even a colleague from the House, Rep. Ruffy Biazon, experienced an MRT breakdown during morning rush hour that resulted in the offloading of passengers and removal of the train.

According to the MRT-3 website, only 20 trains run during rush hours. This is not enough to comfortably transport the 500,000 passengers of the MRT daily. Due to lack of fully operational trains, our commuters endure overly crowded trains and unbearably long queues. During rainy season, these long lines are agonizing.

There are projects to expand railways. We look forward to the country’s first subway system before the Duterte administration ends. However, before focusing on these upcoming infrastructure projects, the leadership should address the current problem of the mass transportation system, particularly the MRT.

We trace the roots of the MRT-3 problems to 2012. Initially, Sumitomo Corp., a Japanese firm with over 94 years of experience in the industry, designed, built, and maintained the MRT-3 from its opening in December 1999 to October 2012. During this period, there were zero accidents and only minimal technical problems reported. The Sumitomo Corp. contract included maintenance service and spare parts. When this contract expired, the DOTC awarded the new maintenance contract worth P517.5 million to PH Trams-CB&T, a two-month-old firm that only had a P625,000 capitalization, through emergency procurement. This contract did not even include spare parts and was just purely for maintenance services. According to then DOTC Secretary Jun Abaya, this was a cheaper option but MRT Holdings, Inc. Chairman Robert John Sobrepeña claimed otherwise. According to him, the government lost P1.4 billion after awarding the maintenance contracts to various providers, instead of renewing the maintenance contract with Sumitomo Corp. Furthermore, in the first year of the MRT-3 under PH-Trams’ maintenance contract, one accident was reported when a short circuit ignited a fire inside and underneath the train. Around 11 broken rail failures were also reported. From September 2013 to 2014, Global APT took over the MRT-3 maintenance and it only worsened the problem, with 3 reported accidents and 22 broken rail failures.

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The Busan Universal Rail Inc. (BURI), a Korean firm, has been in charge of the MRT-3 maintenance from January 2016 to present. However, the DOTr, led by Secretary Arthur Tugade expressed its intent to terminate this maintenance contract because it was allegedly void from the beginning, and because of lapses in the delivery of its maintenance services.

Besides the various problems brought about by the several changes in maintenance service providers, another big problem of the MRT-3 is the result of an inexplicable decision committed by the former administration when it purchased 48 new MRT coaches that were incompatible to the existing system. These coaches were procured for P3.8 billion from Dalian Locomotive and Rolling Stock Co. of China. Unfortunately, they would remain unusable for the next three years because of the unavailability of a signaling system device.

Imprudent and unwise decision-making created this monster of a problem. Where is the logic supporting the decisions that led to this MRT mess? All I can see is how the commuting public continues to suffer.

I call on the DOTr to address the MRT problems with urgency and come up with concrete solutions that would ease, and possibly, eliminate the pain of the commuters. If the agency fails to do so, I will not hesitate to defer the budget of the DOTr in the bicameral budget deliberations.

I put my trust in this administration that it would not commit the same mistakes as the previous administration. Therefore, I expect the DOTr to do things right this time, and I look forward to a more efficient and convenient public transportation system during this term.

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