‘There’s no need to cancel BRT project’

Citing the immediate need for infrastructure to address Cebu City’s traffic problem, a transport leader in Cebu said there would be no need to cancel the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) project in Cebu City.

Ryan Benjamin Yu, president for Cebu Integrated Transport Service Cooperative (Citrasco), said the BRT could coexist with the Light Rail Transit (LRT) project.

“There’s no problem to that, and Cebu needs infrastructure right away,” Yu said when sought for comment on Presidential Assistant for the Visayas Michael Lloyd Dino’s plan to lobby for the cancellation of the BRT project in Cebu.

Yu said he was showing his support in terms of progress, modernization and improvement of transportation in Cebu City even if passenger jeepney units would be affected in the implementation of the BRT project.

Citrasco has 1,000 jeepney units, and 85 percent of them are plying Cebu City routes. The transport group’s other jeepney units are in the cities of Mandaue and Lapu-Lapu.

Yu said his group already has alternative plans on what to do with the units affected by the BRT project.

He said they planned to sell them to farmers, who could use it to bring their products from the farm to the market.

Yu also said that he believed the BRT project would be successful in Cebu just like the BRTs in Korea, China and Singapore.

“It’s true that we have narrow roads, but there will be widening projects for that,” said Yu about the narrow roads as among the reasons to junk the BRT project.

But Philip Zafra, president of the Association of Barangay Councils (ABC) of Cebu City, said he believed there was a need to reassess the BRT project.

Zafra was present during last Saturday’s Metro Cebu Transport Development Stakeholders’ Forum at the Office of the Presidential Assistant for the Visayas’ (OPAV) office.

After listening to Rene Santiago, a freelance consultant on transportation, during the forum, Zafra said that there is a need to reassess the stand over the BRT.

Santiago said that the BRT would not work, citing the narrow roads, and that the LRT would be the right fit for Cebu.

Zafra said that there is a need to address our worsening traffic condition and improve our present transport system; but we must also see that the supposed solution, which will cost billions of taxpayers’ money, will not go to waste.