Dream of that ‘Metro Manila Subway’ – but fix the bus system first!

InterAksyon.com
The online news portal of TV5

Benjamin de la Peña currently serves as the director of community and national strategy for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Follow him on Twitter: @benjiedlp

DBM Usec. Bon Moya, whom I deeply respect and whom I think is one of the country’s finest and most effective civil servants today, asked me if subways are the solution to Metro Manila’s transportation problem. In true improv style, my answer was “yes, and…”

YES, we do need to build more fixed rail…AND we also need to radically improve the rest of our public transportation services: buses, jeepneys, AUVs and taxis.

Usec. Moya’s earnest question frames the box that our transportation officials find themselves in.  They’ve felt the pressure to deliver improvements to public transportation and yet they can only wring their hands in helplessness because they think the only solutions are in building more rail.

Be patient, they tell the commuting public. “The newly ordered trains are on their way. And, look, we have a Dream Plan: we are building more elevated rail lines and even a short subway. Be patient because it will take a few years for all of these rail investments to come on stream.”

Asking the public to be patient about rail infrastructure only shows how our leaders are missing the point. Public transportation is a system and rail is just one component of that system. There are major changes they could roll out without waiting for the long delivery timelines required by fixed rail.

If Malacañang and the DOTC really want to improve the quality of life for the millions of Metro Manila residents who take public transit, they should start with completely overhauling bus service.

We need rail, but rail will not replace the bus

In one of his recent columns on Inquirer.net, former Socio-Economic Planning Secretary Ciel Habito cited data from former Transportation Undersecretary Glicerio Sicat on the number of kilometers of rail service we have per capita. Sicat’s numbers show that we are way behind our sister megacities but, as startling as the gaps are, they overlook the fact that even in cities with extensive rail networks, the bus still takes a huge share of public transport.

According to the latest numbers from Transport for London, their city’s iconic Underground (402 kilometers long) served 1.2 billion passenger trips from 2013 to 2014. But London’s buses served double that number with 2.4 billion passenger trips. The total passenger kilometers serviced by buses also dwarfed the subway rail service 6-to-1. Buses served 491 million kilometers while rail only served 76.2 million kilometers. (Passenger kilometers = total distance traveled by all the passengers who rode the service.)

Similarly, Hong Kong has more than 210 kilometers of heavy and light rail and yet 55 percent of Hong Kong residents take the bus. Only a quarter use rail. Taipei has over 120 kms of rail that carry 14 percent of the mode share, while Taipei buses carry 18 percent. In Singapore, the mode split is 25 percent for bus, 19 percent for rail. In Guangzhou, it’s 35 percent for bus, 14 percent for rail.

Even in cities where the rail service edges out the bus, its still a very close split. Some 12 percent of New Yorkers take rail and 10 percent take the bus. In Seoul, rail service takes 35 percent of the riders while buses carry 28 percent. The one outlier seems to be Tokyo, where rail carries 48 percent of riders while buses only carry 3 percent. But the world’s largest megacity has such an incredibly fine grain of mixed uses – something we should aspire to follow – that 23 percent walk to their destinations, while 14 percent take a bike. (*Data from Passenger Transport Mode Shares in World Cities, JOURNEY, Nov. 2011.)

Building a new, extensive rail system may take us a decade or more. Reforming the bus system can be done much, much more quickly. We can build extensive and high quality bus rapid transit (BRT) and bus feeder services in less than two years. We can reform the bus value chain in one year. It can be done. Our sister megacities have shown the way.

Enrique Peñalosa opened the first phase of Bogota’s Transmilenio BRT system within three years of the inception of the project. Construction took less than a year.

In July of 2004, responding to a transportation crisis, Seoul launched its bus transit reform program that completely restructured the bus service across their megacity. Among the changes, payments were taken electronically. Private bus services were paid directly by government for the kilometers they served, not the number of passengers they carried.

The chaos of the shift only lasted for 3 months. By October of the same year, 90 percent of the Seoul residents expressed satisfaction with the radical reforms.

(The description of Seoul’s bus system prior to reforms sounds very familiar: “Most of the private bus firms sought only to maximize profits (or minimize losses) while disregarding rider safety and comfort… Bus drivers would recklessly race other buses to pick up passengers waiting at bus stops… bus vehicles were old, poorly maintained, and did not meet international standards. Service was dangerous, slow, uncomfortable, and unreliable.”)

We need systems thinking

We need to look at the whole service stack of urban transportation.

Meanwhile, our engineers and scientists in DOST are spending their smarts and their increased budget on designing and testing a monorail service and building a “hybrid electric road-train” as their answer to Metro Manila’s transportation problem.

(I wonder if anyone from DOST bothered to consult with the world’s leading operators and providers of bus rapid transit (BRT) before they built their Godzilla of a bus. There might be very good reasons why no other country is using extra-long, six-axle bus carriages. Hint: it has something to do with service planning.

It might also come as news to them that there are bi-articulated, four-to-five axle, low-floor buses already in service and manufactured by companies such as Volvo, Van Hool and Hess.)

I have yet to hear the DOTC talk about doing anything to improve bus service. (Note how I keep using the word SERVICE when I talk of transportation.) The so-called solutions we’ve deployed have nothing to do with improving the actual service. Instead they are just more tired ways of trying to solve traffic congestion which is the wrong problem to solve.)

We passed (watered-down) regulations requiring salaries for bus drivers after realizing that reckless bus driver behavior was driven by the feudal boundary system. We’re building multi-modal stations to keep provincial buses off EDSA but in so doing, create more problems for the commuting public. We paint extra large numbers and color-code the buses but this is just to make it easier for traffic managers to identify the buses. We even proposed installing RFIDs to enable electronic identification of buses.

None of the above solutions have anything to do with improving the user’s experience of bus service. None of them will make public transportation safer, faster, more efficient or more reliable. None of them will improve the quality of life of our citizens. None of them will encourage private car owners to take the bus.

It’s not a technical problem

You’ve probably seen the quote from Enrique Peñalosa that’s made the rounds of social media. Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogota and global champion of BRT said that an advanced city is “not where the poor move about in cars [but] where even the rich use public transportation.”

He also likes to say that prioritizing public transportation “is not a technical problem, it’s a political problem.”

We can find the solutions if we set our priorities right. And with a super majority of Metro Manilans dependent on public transportation – 8 out of every 10 – our politicians should need no other reason to get things done.

If we want rapid relief from our transportation woes, we have to do radical work on the bus.