Phl mass transit system vs Hong Kong’s MTR

I was in Hong Kong and Macau over the weekend to spend a quiet birthday with my wife Jessica, my daughter Katrina and friends, Boging and Ruth Palacios as it was also Boging’s birthday last Saturday. The Cebu Pacific flight to Hong Kong last Friday was very convenient as it arrived in Hong Kong’s Chep Lap Kok International Airport at 9 a.m. That gave us time to go around Hong Kong for most of Friday.

If there is something that is a huge plus for Hong Kong… it is the great convenience in transportation, where airline passengers are given their choice of transportation from Chep Lap Kok Airport to downtown Kowloon. You can choose to use a bus, a train, taxi or a car rental all within a short walk from the baggage claim. We chose the train as it stops at Hong Kong Central where you can board buses for free to your destination hotel.

Friday afternoon, we again took the train to Lantau Island to see the biggest Buddha Statue via cable car. Lantau Island is next door to Chep Lap Kok International Airport and since it is a tall mountain… the view from there is breathtaking to say the least. This made me recall that 28 years ago, when Governor Emilio “Lito” Osmeña was Cebu Governor, he envisioned to have a cable car run from the Marco Polo Plaza all the way to the central mountains of Cebu. It would have been a great tourist attraction. Now Hong Kong not only has its Ocean Park, they now have it in Lantau Island.

Speaking of visions, 15 years ago, when I was with the Infrastructure Utilities Committee (IUC) of the Regional Development Council (RDC-7), I presented a proposal to connect Cebu to Bohol from Mactan via a tunnel, then through land bridges over water, which should be around 40-plus kilometers long. This proposal was adopted by the late Bohol Governor and Congressman Enrico Aumentado and splashed in national newspapers.

This huge infrastructure project would have brought fresh water (millions of gallons of fresh water are thrown away into the sea daily) from Bohol to Cebu, which Cebuanos would gladly pay to Boholanos and in return, Cebu would have given Bohol the power that it needs. This is not to mention that Cebuanos can now drive their car to Bohol and vice-versa. Alas it is still a pipe dream. Of course we will never stop dreaming of this until it happens!

From our cable car view in Lantau, you can get a glimpse of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai/Macau project, a 42-kilometer roadway over water and linked with a tunnel in the deeper part of the sea. I heard of this project some years back and thought that it would never happen, but the Chinese are doing it. But for the Cebu-Bohol bridge interconnection Imperial Manila just cannot seem to allow an infrastructure of this magnitude to materialize.

Five years have passed since Pres. Benigno “P-Noy” Aquino III took the reins of power in Malacañang and left Cebuanos with no major infrastructure development. The only infra projects are the ongoing road works, destroying good asphalted roads and cementing them. This has only caused massive traffic jams because the Department of Public Works & Highways (DPWH) cannot seem to adopt the western ways of fixing their roads at night when traffic is very light. DPWH is still on an 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. work schedule. They just can’t work out of the box.

One of the things that amazes me is Hong Kong’s Mass Transit Railway (MTR), which I know is the most profitable mass transit system in the world. The MTR is a government-owned corporation and has achieved a remarkable 99.9% on time record. We used the Octopus Smart Card fare, where you deposit say HK$500 and use it anytime you want. Then on Sunday evening after our trip to Mong Kok night market, we returned the Octopus Smart card and got our change back with ease.

Hong Kong’s MTR started operating in 1979 and they now have 55 stations, 87 railway stations and 68 light rail stops. Commuters are given digital information when the next train would arrive, usually in a few minutes. They even have a marketing arm that offers bonus points for commuters to use the MTR and win a trip to Paris! Can you beat that?

Just as I was writing this piece, I found out that last Saturday there was a collision in the Light Railway Transit (LRT) line in Monumento Station, where one passenger was hurt as an LRT slammed into a parked railway car. Last March 2014, a Metro Rail Transit (MRT) also lost its brakes and 8 people were hurt. What we have in the Philippines is sheer incompetence in the maintenance of our rail cars, whether it’s MRT or the LRT.

What a sad commentary that in the Philippines nothing works. I can only reckon that the incompetence in the management of our mass transit system is linked with the incompetence of our political leaders running the Philippines. What a huge contrast from what they have in Hong Kong, where everything works with convenience, while back home everything sucks!

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