Building massive transport infrastructure to ease horrendous traffic is, indeed, a must, but neglecting rural infrastructure may only reinforce bias for development in the big city that only creates a magnet for massive rural-to-urban migration.

Metro subway, a welcome move. The Japan-funded Mega Manila Subway Project (MMSP) costing initially P355.6 billion or $7 billion, up from an original cost of P227 billion, is a welcome development as traffic gridlocks in Metro Manila are costing P2.4 billion a day some years back and could soar to P6 billion a day soon, a Japan International Cooperation Agency (Jica) study says.

Already approved by President Duterte, it will carry daily 500,000 to 750,000 passengers on a full 25.3 kilometers stretch from Mindanao Avenue in Quezon City to Parañaque, and will break ground by mid-2018 and completed by mid-2025. Japan will fund it at an interest rate of 0.10 percent per annum payable in 40 years, with a grace period of 12 years.

Hopefully, parking buildings are built near each station so motorists can park their cars and take the subway. Better still, leave their cars at home and take any feeder transport to the railways.

But build “road trains” in countryside. Mass transits in Metro Manila are, indeed, urgent, but we must not neglect building transport infrastructure in the countryside, particularly the rural south corridor all the way to Southern Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao, where provinces with the worst poverty incidence are located.

Francis Yuseco Jr., developer of “Philippine Trackways” in the mid-1980s, the precursor of the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) now increasingly adopted in 189 cities in 39 countries worldwide, argues that for the same investment for the subway, “we can build a National Trackway of 5,000 kilometers and operate “road trains” or “bus trains”. (BRT is grammatically wrong and be called RBT, instead, to aptly describe a bus transit that’s rapid.)

Unlike the subway carrying a maximum of 750,000 commuters, the trackways with road trains (elongated buses) designed by the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) with existing prototype ready for show, can move 2 million to 5 million passengers a day on an 80-kilometer per hour average speed.

It will also carry cargo and refrigerated truck-trains, hastening and increasing the volume of interisland trade, thus, enabling impoverished rural folks to market almost directly their produce. Along the way, industrial economic zones, farm estates, public markets with postharvest facilities and self-sustaining townships can be set up to provide jobs for both urban poor and excess labor in the farms.

Bus-trains edging out railways? The trackway with the road trains are only a fraction of the railway costs as you only need designated road tracks, not rail tracks, and special elongated buses/trucks for maximum capacity, similar to trains, and no longer need the 20 to 40 time costlier inter-locking railway tracks, power generators, electronic signal systems and train coaches. What takes five to six years to build a railway can be done in less than a year with a bus-train trackway.

If one major system breaks down, the entire railway stops; but with bus-trains, when one unit breaks down, you simply replace it. Thus, RBT has gained popularity worldwide. Some cities, like Xiamen in China, have converted their elevated Light Rail Transits into the RBT road tracks. Malaysia, a neighbor and good model, built recently an elevated RBT, instead of a railway.

Yuseco said worldwide railways are being subsidized. Germany spends €17.0 billion a year in railway subsidies; Switzerland, €4.3 billion; France, €13.2 billion; China, $130 billion; Italy, €7.2 billion; Spain, €5.1 billion; the United Kingdom, €4.5 billion; Japan Cumulative, $300 billion; and the Philippines, P21 billion, mainly because we are raising more pesos paying the same dollar debts incurred when exchange rates were half of what they are today.

Railroading the trend. Apparently, the trend is away from trains, although I support future development of magnetic levitation (Mag-Lev) trains to replace airplanes in speed and volume capacity.

So are we railroading the trend toward bus-trains by sticking to trains? Perhaps, or maybe not, as subways, although costlier, are different as they don’t compete for above-ground road space. Japan’s train makers must have sought their government’s help to market-dump their old train systems through sweeteners like the low 0.1-percent interests and 12-year grace period.

Learn from Lincoln’s railway. It is wise to learn from US President Abraham Lincoln, who built the 3,000-kilometer trans-continental East-to-West Coast railway, cutting travel time from six months to six days. Were he market oriented and influenced by “Free Market” ideology, he would not have built the railways as there were no markets in those frontier inlands.

But what he did angered the British Empire, whose port-based maritime colonial trade was threatened. The British did not forget losing to the 1776 American revolution, and, thus, incited the South to a stupid Civil War that cost over 600,000 American lives from 1861 to 1865. Southerners were made to believe they were threatened and different.

On the contrary, all Americans were different and too busy with their respective ethnocentric communities to bother about slavery emancipation, although Lincoln fought for it. It took over 100 years for America to wake up to race issues after Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968.

The railways did not only create markets for steel and the industrial North, they developed cities like Denver along the way. Lincoln showed exemplary leadership as he straddled the divide of waging a war, while uniting America toward industrialization and building the railways, which were ironically the same issues that triggered the war.

Similarly, road trains can develop towns and bail out agriculture and heIp wipe out poverty as it is here where 76.1 percent of those living in poverty are based.

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