Finally, there’s some good news for Cebu City residents and ardent supporters of the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) project.
After putting off the project for a few years by claiming that it’s expensive and untested, President Benigno Aquino III through the National Economic Development Authority (Neda) approved Cebu City Hall’s BRT prooposap.
If has other stages to hurdle – engineering designs, funding, execution. But if all goes well, the project will be completed in 2017, a year after a new president is in power.
Barring any hitches, Metro Cebu will have plenty of time to adjust to a new public mass transport system which is touted to be better and more environment-friendly than the Light Rail transit (LRT) or Metro Railway Transit (MRT) system now in place in Metro Manila.
Former Cebu City mayor and congressman Tomas Osmeña, who championed the BRT, was understandably upbeat about the approval even if, as he said, it would have been better if the city finished the project earlier so Cebu would have been the first in Asia to use it.
His successor and former ally Cebu City Mayor Michael Rama also lobbied for the project even if, as he claimed, he was ignored by the Palace for the past three years.
You can’t put the merits of a good project down, no matter who’s in power.
The first half of the project consists of further technical preparations followed by full-on implementation which involves road-widening, establishment of BRT routes and terminals and the purchase of the buses.
A crucial component is adjusting the routes of jeepneys whose operators worry that BRT buses will displace them as the “king of the road”.
It doesn’t matter, really, who’s “king”, as long as the interest of the majority, the riding and walking public, is best served by a better system of mass transport.
Despite the campaign for a rail-based system, a return to the pre-war train that used to connect south Cebu to the north, sponsored by pushed by former congressman Eduardo Gullas, who wanted an LRT or MRT, Osmeña stuck to his guns in favor of buses.
Trains on massive concrete overhead tracks like those in Metro Manila would have been a vulgar choice that has Cebu City drowning in its own urbanization and losing what’s left of its physical charm as the Queen of the South.
How soon will we get to see this project materialize, if it took almost 15 years to get off the drawing board of Neda?
Let’s not wait another decade.
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