Government and private transport groups and stakeholders are supporting a proposal to give President Rodrigo Duterte emergency powers to solve the daily six-hour commuting nightmare of millions of Metro Manila commuters.
At a recent high-level transport forum organized by the ADR Institute and Citizen Watch in Makati City, the participants agreed that ongoing infrastructure projects on transportation to address the issue would take years to complete due to a complicated bureaucratic process.
Without emergency powers, key projects, including the proposal to revive a rail cargo project that would ease traffic in Metro Manila and solve port congestion in Ports of Manila, will remain in the back burner.
The Japan International Cooperating Agency, which presented a study “Roadmap for Transport Infrastructure Development for Metro Manila and Surrounding Areas,” predicted that the cost of traffic in Metro Manila would increase to P6 billion a day from P2.4 billion today if there was no intervention by 2030.
The study warned that the metropolis’ lower-income group, basically the blue collar workers earning the minimum wage rate, would be hardest hit when congestion worsened by 2030, especially if the incoming Duterte government failed to institute reforms.
Senator Joseph Victor Ejercito, chairman the Senate Economic Affairs Committee, supports calls for Congress to grant the Duterte administration emergency powers to tackle the country’s public transport woes. He stressed during the forum the importance of having a well-thought out mass transit system in the country.
Ejercito batted for a railway solution to solve the vehicle congestion, particularly in Metro Manila. He said moving people instead of building infrastructure projects to move more vehicles was the best idea.
MRail president Ferdinand Inacay said during the forum government land transportation agencies must decide on what to do with public utility vehicles, such as jeepneys, which had become icons of the past and but were no longer fit to remain on the roads.
Inacay said there was also a need to rationalize the bus operations in Edsa.
“Traffic enforcers must strictly enforce loading and unloading zones; it is also timely to assess and re-visit the loading and un-loading locations because these current zones today may no longer be in the right locations to best serve the riding public,” he added.
Ejercito proposed plans to concentrate on the railway systems and= other projects that would efficiently and conveniently move people, instead of vehicles.
Management Association of the Philippines chairman Eduardo Yap suggested during the forum the issuance of an executive order to declare that a transportation and traffic crisis existed in Metro Manila and, with the concurrence of Congress, secure emergency powers for the President.