Manila’s gridlock wastes $55-M a day

For the last month, my Facebook friends in Manila have been lamenting their utter frustration and helplessness at being sentenced to spend a great portion of their productive lives stuck in traffic with no hope in sight.
One Manila daily explained the problem in its editorial: “These days travel time in the streets of Metro Manila can be three times longer than usual, and this is during sunny days. With a heavy downpour and flash floods, the nation’s premier region becomes paralyzed.”
There are an estimated 12 million Metro Manila commuters who face this paralyzing gridlock which is costing the Philippine economy P2.4 billion pesos ($55 million) a day in potential income from the traffic jams in Metro Manila alone. This is the estimate of the Japan International Cooperation Agency which projects that the figure could jump to P6 billion a day by 2030.
The JICA report also pointed out that congestion leads to increased fuel consumption and automobile emissions as vehicles are forced to operate less efficiently. More vehicles on the road means increased greenhouse gas emissions which lead to increased health costs. Greenhouse gas emissions, JICA warned, are expected to increase to 5.72 million tons a year in 2030, compared to 4.7 million tons a year in 2012.
Rappler’s Katerina Francisco reports that JICA’s P2.4 billion a day figure “includes lost work hours, lost business opportunities due to delays and missed deadlines and wasted fuel.” Francisco estimates these annual losses (P576 billion a year) are greater than the P400 billion infrastructure budget for 2014.
But these figures do not even include the social costs of parents arriving too late to spend any time with their kids to help them with their school work or to meaningfully interact with them about their day. They get home after 2-3 hours of mind-numbing commute, ready to sleep to get up early in the morning to spend another 2-3 hours to get to work.
When a 10 hour a day, 4 days a week work schedule was proposed as a way to ameliorate traffic gridlock, Sen. J.V. Ejercito expressed opposition to the idea because, he said, it would also affect family life. As narrated by Neal Cruz in his column (“Will the 4 day work week work?”), Ejercito said “the employee who has to hurry home to cook for the family would get there very late and the children would be starving by the time dinner is served. Eating a late dinner means staying up late and therefore waking up late the next morning and arriving late in schools and offices. And most of the children and adults would be too sleepy to learn and work efficiently.”
But what Sen. Ejercito does not understand is that what he feared would happen with a new work hour arrangement is what is already happening now. The 4 day a week plan at least offers hope of spending one less day in gridlock hell, which is time parents can spend with their children.
Another suggestion would be to vary or stagger the work hours of the employees. Some can report for work at 10 am (or 11 or 12) and work until 7 pm (or 8 or 9). They may likely arrive home at the same time that they otherwise would when their work hours ended at 5 pm.
The Metro Manila traffic mess has been exacerbated by the simultaneous construction of 15 road projects transforming an already congested metropolis into a traffic nightmare. The road construction is expected to be completed by 2016.
The Aquino government explains that the public works projects are intended to solve traffic congestion and help the Philippines achieve “inclusive growth”.
UP Prof. Jose Regin Regidor questioned how “inclusive” the road projects can be when they are focused only on commuters who use cars and busses. Regidor said the government should spend more on mass transit systems to decongest a bursting mega city. Reliable public transportation should be a priority over fixing roads.
An example of what could be done to improve public transportation is what Bangkok entered into with Japanese consortium to build an urban transit system there for $405 million.
As the Inquirer.net reported on November 4, 2013, “under the deal, ordered by Bangkok Metro Public Co., the consortium will construct a new 23-kilometer (14-mile) rail line in the Thai capital, the daily said, adding the rail operation is set to start in 2016. The Japanese group will supply 63 train cars and build the power grid, signals and rail yards as well as 16 stations for the project. It will also provide maintenance services under a 10-year contract and about 20 technicians with operational expertise will be stationed in Bangkok, the report said.”
In contrast, what did the Philippine government do?
Bangkok started its Metro Rail Transit system in 2004 serving a total of 240,000 passengers daily with 18 operational stations along 20 kilometers (12 mi) of underground route. Not content with the present MRT system, Bangkok entered into a new contract with a Japanese consortium to construct a new 23-kilometer rail line with 63 trains in 16 stations complete with power grid, signals and rail yards and a 10-year maintenance and service contract with 20 technicians with operational expertise all for $405 million.
Like Bangkok, Metro Manila also has a rapid transit rail system in place called the Metro Rail Transit or MRT-3 which consists of a single line that runs in the general direction along the north and south lanes of Edsa Avenue serving close to 560,000 passengers a day. It was constructed by a consortium of private companies led by Robert John Sobrepena of the Fil-Estate Management, Inc. under a Build-Lease-Transfer arrangement which placed all the risks on the private companies to build the MRT system. The total cost for the project was $675.5 Million with $195 million provided by private sector funds an the balance obtained from foreign loans.
The MRT-3 was inaugurated in 1999 and operated by Metro Rail Transit Corporation (MRTC), the private consortium. In 2010, the state-owned Land Bank of the Philippines and the Development Bank of the Philippines purchased a majority interest in the MRTC by buying out the holders of the foreign loans. Out of 14 members of the MRTC Board, 9 seats belong 6to government representatives with only 5 seats assigned to the private sector.
This effectively meant that the new MRTC was working at the direction of the Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) headed by Joseph Emilio Abaya, the former termed-out, three-term congressman from Cavite who previously chaired the House Appropriations Committee. He reportedly received the largest allocation of funds (P408-M) from the Disbursement Acceleration Program (DAP) administered by Department of Budget Management Secretary Butch Abad,.
Instead of expanding the current MRT-3 system that is serving 560,000 passengers daily at full capacity, as Bangkok did, the DOTC has instead asked the Philippine Congress to approve a P54 Billion pesos ($1.285 Billion) allocation in the next fiscal budget for the DOTC to purchase the state-owned bonds of the MRTC purportedly so that it can bid out the contract for a new maintenance provider. This request was endorsed by Budget Secretary Abad.
This is utter nonsense. This P54 Billion budget allocation is a total waste of government resources. It is twice what Bangkok is paying a Japanese consortium to construct a 23 kilometer rail line with 63 cars and a 10 year maintenance contract. The government should use this allocation to construct two more MRT lines to alleviate the congestion of the roadways.
Sen. Chiz Escudero, the chair of the Senate Committee on Finance, does not buy Abaya’s explanation that the DOTC needs the P54 B in order to bid out the maintenance provider for the MRT. “The DOTC can bid that out now without shelling out P54 billion of taxpayer’s money,” Escudero pointed out.
Escudero said that he wants the P54 Billion that the DOTC plans to use for the buyout of the MRT to be used instead for more essential services for the general public like the much needed infrastructure to ease traffic congestion and disaster preparedness programs.
The DOTC can use less than half of that allocation to enter into a contract with the Japanese consortium that is constructing a new line in Bangkok with a 10 year maintenance contract already built in along with 63 train cars and 16 rail stations.
If a new MRT line carrying 500,000 passengers riders could be constructed, this would mean that about 8,000 buses can be taken out of Edsa. That is what will relieve the gridlock hell that is costing the Philippine economy $57 million a day in lost labor and income opportunities.
This P54 B allocation requested by the DOTC to buy out the shares of the government corporations is a mine field for corruption and should be rejected. It will just be a boondoggle for corruption and will only bring Manila closer to the “gates of hell”.
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