Seven railway projects are expected to be operational in the next four years in Metro Manila to help the Philippines catch up with its peers in Southeast Asia.
In terms of metro rail system, the Philippines is still far from other Southeast Asian nations as it only has four railways that are operational with 73 stations, compared to Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore with five, nine, seven and eight railways and 91, 194, 87 and 161 stations, respectively, John Forbes, senior adviser of the American Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines, said in a presentation during the virtual forum on railways.
To catch up, the government is expected to increase the number of stations from 73 to 143 in the next four years once the seven projects are completed.
These projects are the Philippine National Railways (PNR) North Commuter Rail, Light Rail Transit (LRT) line 1 Extension to Cavite project, LRT-2 East Extension, Metro Rail Transit (MRT) line 7, Metro Manila Subway, PNR South Commuter Rail and Unified Grand Central Station.
Three are set to be completed this year: the LRT-2 East Extension, common station and PNR North Commuter Rail. By 2022, the MRT-7 and LRT-1 are targeted to be finished, the PNR South Commuter Rail by 2023 and Metro Manila Subway by 2025.
Aside from these projects, the government has eight more rail projects in the pipeline, including the Mindanao rail network, that are under development.
Meanwhile, Junn Magno, PNR general manager, said at the virtual briefing that in terms of rail density which factors in the country size, the Philippines still ranks last according to the World Bank.
The Philippines has 77 kilometers of railways as of 2019, the least among 119 countries with available data, he added.
As a result, the country is losing $24.8 billion in annual direct economic cost due to traffic congestion in the National Capital Region (NCR) as of 2017, Magno said.
“We need to look at the future (projects) from the perspective of the greater capital region in the next 10 to 20 years, and we are losing $24.8 billion because of traffic in NCR — that’s 7 percent of the 2019 GDP (gross domestic product),” he said.
Magno added the government has several railway projects in the pipeline that will be rolled out in Luzon.
The government came up with the Build, Build, Build program with a P7.7-billion investment, of which P3.2 billion is allocated for rails, including the North and South Commuter rail projects.
The Department of Transportation together with the Light Rail Transit Authority yesterday conducted an inspection of the LRT-2.
The LRT-2 Extension from Masinag to Antipolo is set to be operational this June and will cater to an additional 80,000 passengers dail
