MANILA, Philippines - The Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) said three of the five prequalified groups that submitted bids for the P1.7-billion single ticketing system project for the Metro Rail Transit (MRT) and the Light Rail Transit (LRT) passed the agency’s technical evaluation.
DOTC spokesperson Michael Arthur Sagcal said the AF consortium led by conglomerate Ayala Corp. and infrastructure giant Metro Pacific Investments Corp. (MPIC) of businessman Manuel V. Pangilinan; Comworks-Berjaya consortium; and the SM consortium of retail magnate Henry Sy Sr. passed the evaluation conducted by the agency’s Bids and Awards Committee (BAC).
“We will carefully review the financial proposals of the three remaining groups only. At the end of the day, we must make sure that both government and the public will get the most advantageous terms possible,†Sagcal stressed.
After opening the financial proposals on Monday, he said the agency would conduct a financial evaluation of each opened submission in accordance with the Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) Law.
“We have been speeding up the process. At the rate we are going, we should be able to award the contract by January,†he added.
The two groups that failed to hurdle the agency’s technical evaluation were the E-Trans Solutions Joint Venture Inc. and Megawide-Suyen-Eurolink consortium due to substantial deficiencies regarding their ability to implement the project.
According to the BAC, E-Trans Solutions’, technical proposal did not describe the required conditions for use of the project, which would protect the card user’s data privacy. It was also found to be incomplete, unclear, and did not show compliance with the project’s scheme provider principles. Moreover, its business plan did not follow the projection computations contained in the draft concession agreement.
As for Megawide-Suyen-Eurolink, its business plan was found to be incomplete and inconsistent and did not contain the required project internal rate of return, making it impossible to evaluate the project’s feasibility.
In addition, the payment and revenue numbers it indicated in one section of the business plan contradicted the very same items contained in another section. It also pegged its post-tax equity return at -2.64 percent, which indicates that the proposal may not be self-sustaining.
All five groups submitted technical bids and financial bids for the P1.72 billion Automatic Fare Collection System (AFCS) project last Nov. 18.
The winning consortium has the option to expand the contactless card system to other businesses in and out of the transportation sector such as in retail transactions.
The MRT-LRT single ticket is envisioned to be like Hong Kong’s Octopus Card, which serves as a debit card, aside from being a stored-value train ticket. The single ticket could also be used for other modes of transportation such as buses, paying toll, electronic banking, and even shopping.
The AFCS project would bring important benefits to the more than one million daily passengers using the light rail lines, ensuring seamless interconnection for travelers and removing the current inconvenience of the need to buy separate tickets for separate lines.
It would allow the operating authorities to develop a service offering that better suit the needs of the passengers through a system similar to Hong Kong, London, the Netherlands and other countries.
It would replace the current magnetic-based ticketing system that is very much at the end of its usability and could also serve as an electronic micropayment solution in convenience stores, or as identifier for loyalty schemes, facility access and location based services as well as other transport modes including buses and taxi cabs.
The riding public has long urged government to implement a common ticketing system for the LRT Lines 1 and 2 and the MRT 3 as the different ticketing schemes employed in the three mass transport systems have been blamed for the long lines of passengers buying tickets at the train stations.
The MRT line that runs from Baclaran in Pasay City to North Ave. in Quezon City services around 600,000 passengers per day, way above its capacity of 350,000.
On the other hand, LRT Line 1, which runs from Baclaran in Pasay City to Roosevelt in Quezon City, serves at least 500,000 passengers daily while the LRT Line 2, which operates from Recto in Manila to Santolan in Pasig City, caters to 350,000.