More ways to improve the metro traffic

We continue today with Rene Santiago’s white paper on how to solve Metro Manila’s traffic woes. In this installment, our reader tackles the need to reinvent public transport. Read on.

“The unfortunate fact is that government has neglected our urban public transport system – except for the occasional building of bus stops and loading bays, and recurring plans to build provincial bus terminals and ban them from urban roads.

“It has focused on expensive urban rail lines – which are necessary but hardly sufficient, and takes very long implementation times. Even the enforcement of yellow lanes – meant to improve bus travel times – is flawed.

The untouchable jeepneys

“The jeepneys have become untouchables too long. Replace all of them gradually with better versions – low emissions, energy efficient, designed for urban commuting and taller Filipinos, equipped with GPS and wired into an Intelligent Transport System (ITS).

“This form of para-transit is despised by car users, but they carry nearly 50 percent of daily commutes and provide employment to a quarter million of the urban populace. And culturally, it has become an icon of Filipino pride (and sadly, also emblematic of backwardness).

“Modernize the jeepneys and the way they operate on our streets and you throw out a ‘heritage of smallness,’ to borrow from Nick Joaquin, aside from reducing air pollution. The old style of atomized management, tolerable in rural and small towns, becomes dysfunctional in a metropolis.

Revamp bus system

“Re-organize buses and reduce the number of operators – only two per corridor. More than 600 bus operators do not conduce to branding and service differentiation, a fertile ground for ‘colorum operations.’ Manage their deployment under a Central Operations Center of a metro wide ITS.

“Seoul in South Korea demonstrated how it can be done. One current official was given a tour in Seoul, gushed about it, and returned pushing for something Seoul dismantled – an elevated roadway into the heart of the city.

“Ordering bus operators to engage drivers on salary basis helps in taming unruly street behavior, but will cause hardly a ripple in traffic relief. The more enduring solution is to restructure the industry, change its exploitative business model. Pool the revenues and pay out bus operators (and jeepneys also) on the basis of contracted trips made on predefined routes and headways.

Railway versus bus rapid transit

“Urban railway is at the top of the public transport hierarchy, but they cannot be everywhere. Less than 10 percent of daily trips are carried by the four rail lines. Expanding the system takes a few years, but our weak institutions stretch execution to decades.

“Line 1 extension to Cavite should have been completed in 2004; Line 2 extension to Masinag in 2009; and Line 3 upgraded three years ago. These expensive assets are badly managed; maintenance is treated like a janitorial service.

“Bills to reform the rail sector have languished in Congress in the last 15 years. Everyone opted “to kick the can down the road” – including the necessity of adjusting fares. While many countries -developed and developing - have already changed their business models, our railway entities are still locked in the archaic ways of the past.

“The solution is to privatize all the three rail lines, including the PNR commuter service – akin to what was done on water supply. If we want world-class rail transit, we have to professionalize their management. That will not happen under public sector management. Imagine your water faucets today, had the ‘pain’ of privatization not been done 15 years ago.

“Instead of being rail-centric, BRT (bus rapid transit) lines in the major roads of Metro Manila will be the cost-effective solution to addressing urban mobility problems (as shown by many experiences in Latin America, Australia, and Asia). It also offers a platform for the existing bus operators to work together.

“BRT systems have the potential to deliver passenger capacities comparable to railway systems, at a fraction of the cost of rail. Well-planned and designed BRT systems also put a high premium on customer service. After all, passengers are a public transport system’s customers, and they deserve nothing less. It is more appropriate in Commonwealth Avenue, rather than MRT-7.

““A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.”

Little things that mean a lot

“Let subdivisions and exclusive villages organize car pools. They should be generous with limited public use of some of their roads. Companies or buildings with large employee should do the same. Instead of promoting car ownership with their generous car-plans, they should also craft their respective public transport programs. Big business has to pay attention to the commons, and not leave everything to the government.

“Large private schools and campuses must do likewise. Traffic on Ortigas Avenue in San Juan, for example, is very bad because of three universities whose studentry is dependent on private cars.

“When four persons carpool, it takes away three cars out of the road. Build more in-campus dormitories for students and teachers to reduce need to travel. Walk, if the distance is less than a kilometer. It is good for your health.

“Wait for your ride on designated bus stops, shun buses/jeepneys that pick up passengers anywhere. Local government units must rebuild sidewalks systematically, and as part of the building permitting system. Rome was not build in a day.

“Large property developers should not externalize their respective traffic impacts. Instead, they should deliberately plan and execute schemes to integrate public transport into their complexes. Stop building communities anchored on private cars; build them for walkability.

Telecommuting

“Do more telecommuting. Let the work move, rather than the worker. Corporations and offices have enough brilliant minds to find creative ways to do it. Imagine if 10 percent of the more than one million extra daytime populations that swells Makati were to work at home; that would be 100,000 less trips per day or 50,000 fewer cars on the road. Government can do no less, by putting on-line many government transactions that are currently traffic magnets.

Traffic education

“Educate and re-educate traffic enforcers, bus drivers, and jeepney drivers, in that order of priority. This is a never-ending mission. Traffic is not just about roads, it is also about the human element. Good roads are made useless by bad drivers, but good and civil drivers make even bad roads function properly even without traffic enforcers. Perhaps, this is something the Automotive Association of the Philippines can embrace as a mission, in partnership with key government agencies.”

We will continue in the next column the final installment of this wonderful treatise on how to tackle the metro’s mobility challenges.

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Should you wish to share any insights, write me at Link Edge, 25th Floor, 139 Corporate Center, Valero Street, Salcedo Village, 1227 Makati City. Or e-mail me at [email protected]. For a compilation of previous articles, visit www.BizlinksPhilippines.net.