Clark railway study OK’d as MRT woes hound DOTC

THE CLARK International Airport in the Clark Freeport in Pampanga province is an important infrastructure that helps boost economic development in northern and central Luzon. TONETTE T. OREJAS/INQUIRER Central Luzon

CLARK FREEPORT—The Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) has been given by President Aquino the go-signal to prepare a feasibility study for a high speed rail to this economic zone as the department searches for solutions to continuing problems besetting one of its busiest railways, the Metro Rail Transit (MRT).

Mr. Aquino had given the directive at a meeting last month of a Cabinet cluster attended by top transportation and finance officials and members of the Cabinet close to the President, according to Victor Jose Luciano, president and chief executive officer of the Clark International Airport Corp. (CIAC).

“The President is very open about having a high-speed rail to a gateway airport in Clark,” Luciano told Inquirer in a recent interview.

A modern railway has been a dream for local governments and the business sector in Central Luzon after the government sued the Chinese contractor of the Northrail for delays and other anomalies.

The DOTC is currently seeking solutions to several breakdowns and bottlenecks in the MRT, the railway that stretches along Edsa.

A consumers’ group said what the department should look at are not news reports about MRT problems but actual data.

“The numbers do not lie,” said Oliver San Antonio, counsel of the group National Coalition of Filipino Consumers (NCFC), in a statement.

“Smart and effective policy making is always guided by hard data, not news reports,” San Antonio said in statement.

He said a close look at data would show that the average number of cars in MRT actually increased from 2007, reaching its peak this year.

He said DOTC data showed that the daily average number of cars was 60.6 in 2014 compared to just 57.8 in 2007, 57.4 in 2011 and 59 last year.

He said there had been more train removals per year from January 2009 to October 2012 and October 2012 to September 2013 than in recent months.

While there had been more service interruptions recently, it should be viewed in the context of aging trains. “Car owners know that even when well maintained, a car will have more trips to the repair shop in its tenth year compared to its fifth year,” said San Antonio. Tonette Orejas, Inquirer Central Luzon with a report by Jerome Aning in Manila