The BRT’s viability

CAPILLAS

As I wrote this piece, a quake disrupted what looked to be just another office day at the Cebu Daily News newsroom at past 4 p.m. yesterday; and the tremors, while thankfully not that strong, were more than enough to alarm employees who went outside of their offices by instinct to ensure their safety.

Initial details from the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs) as reported by the Philippine Daily Inquirer said it was a 6.5-magnitude earthquake that rocked Jaro town on Leyte Island.

I join the others in praying and hoping that it doesn’t lead to any more quakes. It’s been more than three years, yet the memory of that Oct. 15 earthquake remains fresh in my mind and I was reminded of it anew with yesterday’s quake.

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WITH Raffy Yap, project management chief of the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), saying there is “zero to minimal” chance of the BRT being shelved or canceled by the national government, maybe, just maybe, it would take nothing less than a come-from-behind — to use sports lingo talk — miracle from critics like Presidential Assistant for the Visayas Michael Dino to successfully convince President Rodrigo Duterte to drop it in favor of his pet Light Railway Transit (LRT) project.

I’ve listened to both opponents and proponents of the BRT led by Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña and his supporters on one hand and Dino and his newfound(?) allies on the other, and the arguments to retain the BRT are lopsidedly more sensible and logical than the arguments to outright cancel it.

Dino wants the BRT project canceled on the say-so of one transport expert whose general assessment would have to be verified with another multimillion-peso/dollar feasibility study to be financed by whichever foreign institution Dino’s office would have to find for themselves — unless Dino wants the P10 billion or P17 billion allocated for the BRT to be used to fund the LRT, which would stupefy or render foreign financial institutions in catatonic disbelief.

Besides securing support from President Rodrigo Duterte, the National Economic Development Authority (Neda) and the Department of Transportation (DOTr), as well as a seal of approval from the World Bank and other foreign financial institutions, the BRT had undergone a number studies for several years before it was deemed suitable for service as Cebu City’s mass transport system.

For Dino to call for the cancellation of the BRT and replace it with the LRT is, again to use sports analogy, like having one team walk out in the middle of a game — because things aren’t going their way and the referees are biased against them and so on — only to come out later to demand that the game be scrapped and the rules changed in their favor or else they won’t play.

I’d like to see Dino and the mayor make their case to President Duterte and the top officials of the agencies on live TV, but that depends if Dino has the clout to secure an audience with the President, who is too busy attending to the Marawi City siege and his upcoming State of the Nation Address to revisit a project that had already been cleared to go by his Cabinet officials.

Anyone familiar with the local political landscape can already smell the stink of politics three kilometers away behind the manifesto signed by barangay officials calling for a review of the BRT.

The “review” is obviously a convenient alibi for them in case the BRT does work and they would be held accountable by the riding public for trying to block the implementation of the BRT project; they’re calling for a review only, not its outright cancellation as their new patron Dino had so vocally lobbied for.

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THE transport expert Dino deferred to was Engr. Rene Santiago, who had some involvement in the first Light Railway Transit (LRT) project in Manila and wrote about the traffic crisis in the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

In an article on Rappler, Santiago was quoted as saying that he had raised the alarm bells on Manila’s looming traffic crisis to former president Benigno Aquino but didn’t recommend using emergency powers to solve it.

I have to ask this based on gut feeling: If Santiago’s involvement in conceptualizing the LRT project were to be used as basis for his qualification to assess the validity of the BRT project in Cebu, is his assessment or evaluation better than those who have taken years to study how the BRT would impact on the traffic and the riding public and are working with people who are continually refining the BRT project so it can work for Cebu City residents and visitors?

It is perhaps a totally unrelated, even a ridiculous analogy or comparison, but if the principle of the BRT at work is comparable to the SM MyBus units that ply the routes to and from the mall to various designated points, then there is probably more than a substantial chance that the BRT may actually work.

I wonder if transport experts like Engr. Santiago include in their assessment the actual experience of commuters with existing transport systems.