Impressive, sana!

By Boo Chanco (The Philippine Star), Apr 24, 2017

The Infrastructure presentation last week was impressive. The use of social media to spread the word around was impressive as well.

I honesty hope they will be able to carry out that massive infrastructure building program they are promising. We need all those facilities yesterday. I also hope the Duterte economic managers are not promising more than they can deliver.

But I was also disappointed with the impressive power point presentation and the You Tube version they posted on social media. It was too future oriented and neglected the present situation. Maybe it was intentional to make us forget present inadequacies. So they made us dream, which sets us up for big disappointments later.

Sure… I agree we need to dream and plan for the long term. But past administrations have done this already. Pina-asa ng pina-asa ang tao, tapos wala rin. It was wrong for that presentation to say little or nothing about the present. There are low hanging fruits in terms of half finished projects left by the last administration waiting to be completed.

Okay… I concede the long term infra projects they offered are the real solutions to the present problems. Take traffic, for instance. That mouth watering subway system is the way to go. But that subway won’t be useful for the next 10 years or more.

For one thing, the Japanese are still busy with preparations for the Tokyo Olympics. Their engineers and other technical people have their hands full until after the Olympics. They are likely to dribble this project until then.

Business ( Article MRec ), pagematch: 1, sectionmatch: 1
What happens to our horrific traffic problem in the meantime? There will be close to half a million new vehicles on our streets by the time this year ends. It seems the big infra presentation neglected to tell us what they will do to address the traffic problem in the meantime.

It would have been nice if the Duterte administration, riding on the supermajority it enjoys in Congress, could promise us the emergency powers the President sought even before he took office is as good as done. It may not solve our traffic problem as effectively as we want, but at least it would remove an excuse of the transportation department for not doing enough.

A study recently made by PIDS, the government think tank, had some interesting if worrisome observations. Apparently, estimated daily losses of P2.4 billion made by the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) are just half of what it really is.

According to PIDS, the annual social cost of congestion on Edsa is P5.5 billion. That includes foregone wages of passengers who come to work late and high bus operating costs in plying the congested thoroughfare.

Hopeless? Not quite. There is something the transport department can do right now but is afraid of doing: fix the bus system on Edsa.

According to PIDS, there are about 12,595 buses operating within Metro Manila and from neighboring provinces. Some 3,711 of those operate the Manila-Edsa route, while 1,632 franchised bus units ply the non-Edsa routes.

However, the 2015 PIDS study noted that bus occupancy rate within Edsa was as low as 52 percent. This means the buses plying Edsa run half-empty most of the time. Isn’t this situation crying out to be fixed by government?

If the government is afraid of dealing with bus operators by ordering a cut in authorized number of buses, let economics work. Lower bus fares. The public will love that. Bus operators will cut their units on their own.

And for good optics, the transport department should rush the completion of the LRT2 extension to Masinag, Antipolo. The superstructure is completed because the contractor, DMCI is experienced and competent to carry out the project.

But there are no trains because there are no stations yet, no rails, no power system and no everything else. The Abaya era DOTC chopped chopped the contracts. If they gave it all to one contractor, for example DMCI, we would probably be using that extension now. But chop chop contracts allow their friends to get a piece of the pie.

Government’s incompetence in project management is seen by all in that massive and obviously unused superstructure. Maybe because it is a long delayed project from the Arroyo and Aquino administrations, there is little interest for the transport department to see it speedily completed. This is wrong. They should quickly complete the project and claim credit for doing something the Abaya DOTC miserably failed to do.

Our long suffering people will be more impressed with a constant flow of completed and delivered projects rather than pies in the sky. Never mind that this administration didn’t start those projects. What is important is that people can use and benefit sooner.