The funds for the proposed projects to solve the traffic congestion at the UN Avenue-Plaridel Street junction in Mandaue City will be taken from the P500 million initially set aside by the Department of Public Works and Highways in Central Visayas (DPWH-7) for road right of way (RROW) acquisition and intersection widening or flaring.
The DPWH-7 and Mega Cebu Development and Coordinating Board (MCDCB) agreed on where to source the funds for their separate proposed projects in the area.
But whether the DPWH’s original plan to build an underpass at the area or Mega Cebu’s recommendation to build channelized flared intersections will be followed remains to be seen, said Florentino Nimor, Mandaue City Planning and Development Officer.
The DPWH-7 has proposed to build a P940-million “depressed structure (an underpass)” along UN Avenue and the junction of Plaridel Street in Mandaue City, but Mega Cebu has recommended a P55-million channelized flared intersections project be built instead.
“What they agreed on is that what is common in both the proposals will be implemented. For us, that is a win-win situation,” Nimor told Cebu Daily News in a phone interview yesterday.
Representatives of both parties including the the Lapu-Lapu City government and Nimor, who was representing the Mandaue City government met last Friday to come up with a compromise on the solution to the traffic problem in the area.
Nimor said he welcomed the proposal of Mega Cebu, but he believed that an underpass in the area will be more effective in addressing the traffic problems there.
“The city governments of Mandaue and Lapu-Lapu, more so the latter, have clamored for an underpass,” said Nimor.
An underpass, he said, will make it easier for Cebu City-bound vehicles from Mactan Island to turn left to Plaridel Street (but officially known as D.M. Cortes Street).
He said the original plan had already been endorsed twice by the Mandaue City Development Council in two years and has been endorsed by the Regional Development Council in Central Visayas (RDC-7) to the national government.
Engineer Nonato Paylado, head of the DPWH-7 planning division, said that the underpass is only a P940-million project and not a P2-billion tri-level structure, as had been earlier claimed by a Mega Cebu representative in his presentation during last Thursday’s RDC-7 Infrastructure and Development Committee meeting.
Paylado also said that the project will be undertaken through a build-and-design scheme where the contractor will be the one to design and build the structure.