Rationalizing the Edsa bus route

THERE’S good news for Edsa motorists.

Last week, the World Bank and the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA) signed an agreement to address traffic congestion along Edsa by reducing the volume of buses plying the Philippines’ busiest main thoroughfare.

The project called “EDSA Bus Reduction Project” aims to bring down bus traffic by putting in place a system for dispatching buses using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology.

With RFID, the government hopes to manage the dispatch of units at terminals, limit dwell times at bus stops, enforce franchise and traffic rules, and ban arbitrary trip-cutting and out-of-line operations.

Each registered bus will be fitted with an electronic tag that will have a unique identifier code that is associated in the computer database, so when RFID-tagged buses enter terminals, principal stops, and a number of other locations where tag readers are installed, they will be detected.

The technology would also help identify off-route running buses.

The information is sent by the readers to the central server with software applications that interpret the data and support the headway management, dispatching, dwell-time management, violation-detection, and violation-reporting functions—all of which would help eliminate illegal operators and buses.

These measures are expected to reduce the number of buses in transit along EDSA and reduce queues at stops, thereby alleviating congestion and increasing the average speed of travel. The resulting reduction in the number of bus trips and the time each bus spends on the road will reduce fuel consumption per passenger per kilometer traveled, thus cutting emissions of carbon dioxide and local air contaminants.

An estimated 5,000 buses—including up to 1,500 colorums or illegally operating units—contribute to traffic congestion and greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution on EDSA.

The World Bank said the project would not only cut down GHG pollution, but also redound to health and economic benefits for Metro Manila residents.

The lender said the project would reduce pollution-induced sickness, which affects more than a million people and leads to the premature death of 15,000 people each year. The aggregate savings is estimated at more than $20 million a year.

This amount excludes the scores of people—both passengers and motorists—killed by reckless bus drivers and their poorly maintained vehicles.

Rationalizing the dispatch of buses along Edsa has long dogged the government, especially after the Aquino administration privatized what used to be the state monopoly service, and opened the thoroughfare to freewheeling competition by the private sector.

The Philippine experience in privatization and liberalization of the Edsa bus route is pure chaos. Witness how buses eat up two to three lanes in their quest to snatch a piece of the dwindling passenger base not only from rival bus companies, but also from units belonging to the same firm.

This renders useless the MMDA’s yellow lanes, and in recent years, the pink fenced-in lanes. Consider the waste of taxpayers’ money during the pre-pink fence era, as the MMDA paints those lanes yellow every three or so months.

Now that the new MMDA leadership is dismantling the pink fences, they are adding to the sums of public money wasted on hare-brained ideas of reining in Edsa buses.

In other countries, key urban centers enjoy the services of either a state-owned fleet or a private monopoly, which in any event is strictly monitored by the government and adheres to a system of dispatching vehicles.

This largely explains the clockwork and quality service rendered by bus companies in those areas, not to mention the minimal traffic congestion and pollution arising from the use of public buses. And they didn’t have to resort to RFID technology.

Short of reinstating a state monopoly for bus service along Edsa, policy-makers should make the best out of the latest technology.

As the population debate sees no end, the government has to pursue measures to address the challenge of transporting an ever-growing urban population along Edsa.

The expansion of the light rail transit, if not the construction of complementary lines, will take several years. In the meantime, bus services along Edsa has to be rationalized. We should give RFID a chance in this particular area. –Manila Times