Why not build a funicular railway for Metro Manila?

RFirst of two parts ecently, Department of Transportation Secretary Arthur P. Tugade proposed the cable car, citing the experience of La Paz, Bolivia, where a 10-kilometer long “Telefericos,” a network of several cable car lines, serves as the city’s primary public urban transit system. The cable cars are integrated with underground rail (subways) and surface transport ( buses). Now, before you roll over laughing, Senator Grace Poe, in studying the grant of emergency powers to slay the traffic beast, welcomed such out-of-the-box solutions.

For us living in these 7,107 islands, we may find cable car mass transit a joke considering we do not have an alpine landscape like Switzerland, nor are our heavily populated mega cities found on steep- sided mountains — which would make zigzag highways or steep climbing cog-and-rack railways near impossible to build. Moreover, our popular impression of cable cars — gondolas taking tourists or skiers to the summit for sport or scenery gazing — come from memories of tourist funicular railways in the Isle of Capri or Ocean Park Hong Kong.

We are no strangers to cable cars, thanks to out- of- favor oligarch Roberto V. Ongpin, who insisted on a funicular for the first phase of Tagaytay Highlands back in the FVR-era 1990s. And, if memory serves us right, a rather appropriate aerial tram was part of the package of plans proposed by a Taiwanese investor that was to take over and link John Hay Air Base in Baguio, Mountain Province to Poro Point in La Union by the sea. The latest proposals using funiculars are from some LGU that proposed man-made island resorts reclaimed from Laguna de Bay to reach the hillsides of the Sierra Madre.

Make no mistake, the cable car as mass transit is catching on in Latin America and China’s populous cities more so than in other parts of the world. They are built far faster than Bus Rapid Transit systems or railways and operate at a tenth of the cost. For the 2012 London Olympics, Emirates Airlines only took 10 months to build a funicular connecting North Greenwich to the Royal Docks over the River Thames. Funicular railways require far less right-of-way private property expropriation than road or rail expansion, though the question of “air” rights has to be tackled in applying such to our local urban areas.

The capacity of the gondolas in the rather extensive network in La Paz are at 3,000 persons per hour per direction, equivalent to the full capacity of a hundred-stretch jeepney, doing a round trip per hour. Though their languid pace of 16 kph limits their turnaround frequency, cable cars are one of the most quiet and arguably the most scenic means of safe public transport that could ever cruise above stinking, crowded and flooded city streets. In Rio, the cable cars hover in safety over the more dangerous favelas, communities that have been known to have random and frequent drug gang gun battles. Rio’s middle- class cariocas are dependent on local- hire domestic help who live in the favelas, just like their counterparts in other Central and Southern American cities. For them, cable cars are the favored means of cheap and reliable transportation to get to their jobs safely and cleanly.