Surrender not in vocabulary
Current DoTr policy does not allow gambling with passengers’ safety in exchange for higher revenues
Department of Transportation (DoTr) Secretary Arthur Tugade said his agency is ready to deliver the highest level of public service with or without the Senate’s approval of “emergency powers” to address the daily road gridlocks.
Tugade stressed that the DoTr will never waste the chance given to it to bring change to the nation through the provision of a safe and orderly public transportation system.
“We need that (emergency powers) but if they don’t want to give it, we will still work using every means possible to address the
problem. No retreat, no surrender,” the Transportation chief said.
Tugade said he will not waste the political capital of the President who has a strong will and an acceptable leadership.
Sen. Grace Poe, chairman of the Committee on Public Services, had blocked proposals to grant special powers to President Rodrigo Duterte as she stated that those who are clamoring for emergency powers maybe merely wanted to skirt public bidding on major contracts.
Priority is passengers
The DoTr also underlined the agency’s priority in guaranteeing passengers’ safety more than the profit motive in running the Manila Metro Rail Transit System Line 3 (MRT-3).
“Revenues require ridership, ridership requires trains, and it is unfortunate that the number of reliable and safe trains available to MRT-3 in 2018 went down due to years of neglect, bad maintenance practices, and failure to undertake scheduled overhaul and upgrades,” the agency noted.
The DoTr issued the statement in response to a Commission on Audit (CoA) report citing the low revenues of the train operator in 2018.
The agency also noted that years of mismanagement resulted in the compounded degradation of the train system, which the current leadership of the agency had halted in 2018 and which is expected to be reversed with a 26-month comprehensive rehabilitation of the railway undertaken by Sumitomo-Mitsubishi Heavy Industries from May 2019 to July 2021.
Safety outguns revenue
Revenue maximization is not its primary objective and current DoTr policy does not allow gambling with passengers’ safety in exchange for higher revenues.
Since the MRT-3 Maintenance Transition Team took over after the termination of Busan Universal Rail Inc. (BURI) in November 2017, measures have been taken to deploy trains that are safe and reliable.
This means that since 2018, MRT-3 only deploys trains that are not likely to break down during operations, because breakdowns result not just in passenger inconvenience but more importantly, breakdowns expose passengers to safety risks, especially in cases of unloading incidents between stations.
The previous management of MRT-3 apparently practiced “forced deployment” of trains, regardless of reliability and safety. This led MRT-3 to earn the label “MRTirik,” shown in the hundreds of unloading incidents that hounded the system from 2012 to 2017, the DoTr indicated.
The policy now of deploying only safe and reliable trains and putting passengers’ safety first over revenue, has resulted in unloading incidents drastically going down to 57 in 2018 and 16 in 2019 to date, according to DoTr.
Forced deployment of unreliable and unsafe trains may have been driven by the commercial considerations of earlier maintenance providers, who got paid based on the number of deployed trains, regardless of whether those trains break down during operations, the agency said.