Another LRT project

It’s difficult to base our views on incomplete information. Consider the talk about a proposed Light Rail Transit (LRT) project the implementation of which would supposedly start next year. What prompted the talk was a press release that utterly lacked details supposedly from the Office of the Presidential Assistant for the Visayas (OPAV).

A mass transport project to be finally implemented in Cebu? That seems to be the focus of the press release, which unfortunately could not say whether the paper works have been completed for it. But that has been what this issue has been all about for us for years now. Government officials and even private companies make noise about a mass transport project that is soon lost in the shuffle.

Before this, a private entity talked about a Metro Rail Transit (MRT) that is also to supposedly break ground soon. The press release was detailed on the route and other peripherals but could not say if all the requirements by the government bureaucracy have been complied with. Which is not surprising because projects of this magnitude pass one review after another that takes years to complete.

Like what I have written before, the only mass transport project that was on the verge of being implemented is that of the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT). We all knew how the project was conceived and when and followed every step of the process it went through for I think almost two decades now. This, though, is a government-initiated project under the Department of Transportation (DOTr), thus the slow processing phase.

What excited me for a while a couple of years ago was the timetable for the operation of the first phase of the BRT project: 2019. That would have been next year. From Bulacao to the Ayala Center in Cebu City would have already traversed segregated buses that would have ferried around 300,000 passengers daily. But the delays came and, finally, efforts to scuttle its implementation.

But who would have thought that changes in governance—and the vindictiveness of the past-at the local and national level would become the bane of the BRT project? Rodrigo Duterte won as this country’s president and so did Tomas Osmeña as Cebu City mayor. With a new president came new appointments. Businessman Michael Dino became presidential assistant for the Visayas.

Osmeña years ago scuttled a major project in Banilad initiated by Dino and the Cebu Provincial Government headed then by Osmeña’s bitter political rival, Gwendolyn Garcia. This brazen act has thus come back to hound Osmena, who conceptualized the Cebu BRT project in his previous terms as mayor. Now it is the people of Cebu who are paying for the Osmeña brand of ruthless politicking. The BRT is the casualty.

One can fault this partly on the kind of democratic setup we have. Officials would rarely conceive projects whose implementations go far beyond their terms of office because chances are high these would not be seen through by their successors. The BRT is the latest example. Will the recent variation of the LRT and MRT be any different?

Again, that’s why I don’t listen to all those mass transport talk until I see the work start.