Osmeña vows to fight for Cebu City’s BRT

“We will fight the Cebu Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) project out. I am not worried.”

This was the response of Cebu City Mayor Tomas Osmeña to Presidential Assistant for the Visayas Michael Dino’s pronouncement that he will lobby before President Rodrigo Duterte and other government agencies to cancel the project.

But before Dino can lobby to have the BRT scrapped, Osmeña said that the former should get approvals from the National Economic and Development Authority and the Anti-Competition Commission for an alternative system, otherwise, Cebu will end up with nothing.

“This is typical crab mentality. He wants to destroy and I will build faster than he can destroy. I’m ready, willing and able to fight it out,” he told SunStar Cebu in a text message yesterday.

Dino’s pronouncement came after Engr. Rene Santiago, a transportation and engineering expert, said that the BRT is not ideal for the city because of the physical limitation of its roads.

If the city ventures into mass transport, implementing a Light Railway Transit system with a route that will reach outside the city is ideal, Santiago said.

He also said that the city’s BRT copies the Hanoi BRT, which is a failed project in Vietnam.

The engineer added that the Cebu City Government and the Department of Transportation should consider returning the P10.2-billion loan from the World Bank intended for the project to avoid penalties.

However, Osmeña said that Dino and Santiago may try and stop the BRT, but this will not discourage him as he had spent two decades to work on the im- plementation of the project.

He said that he got the support of the Asian Development Bank, World Bank and the Japanese Government in 2008 for the BRT. Even the French Government extended funds for the project, he added.

“Of course, Dino claims he knows better than all of them. He is entitled to make a fool of himself, but not at the expense of the good of our city,” Osmeña said.

Earlier, Atty. Rafael Christopher Yap, BRT project manager, said that they were aware of the problems of the BRT in Hanoi and made sure that these were addressed in the local design.

If there are technical concerns and other observations on the project, Yap said these should be formally endorsed to the project implementation unit. /