Can Bogotá Bus Rapid Transit system work in Manila?

MANILA, Philippines — With different traffic schemes being implemented and at least P3.5 billion a day in losses in traffic cost for the Philippines, the city of Bogotá in Colombia is suggesting its Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) as a transport system applicable to Manila.

Bogotá Mayor Enrique Peñalosa, who has visited the Philippines many times, considers the BRT as the only applicable transport system.

In a recent meeting with Philippine Ambassador to Brazil Marichu Mauro and Reps. Cesar Sarmiento and Edgar Mary Sarmiento, the chairperson and vice-chairperson of the transportation committee of the House of Representatives, respectively, Peñalosa said that installing a BRT system in Manila is long overdue.

“I believe that the Philippines cannot function without Manila and Manila cannot function without an efficient transport system,” Peñalosa said.

He was emphatic about how citizens lose many precious hours of potential productivity while stuck in traffic, which is the situation in Manila today.

The BRT is a bus-based public transport system that functions like a rail system with dedicated roads and lanes for buses. With this system, buses are more frequent and can transport more passengers quickly at a fraction of the cost that it takes to build and maintain rail systems.

“It’s very effective,” said Mauro, who was able to experience Bogotá’s BRT system first hand during the study-visit that the Philippine embassy in Brazil arranged for the lawmakers.

During the visit, the ambassador and the lawmakers rode the BRT and visited its main terminals, bus depots and control centers. The delegation also visited Consortio Express, the biggest of the seven operators under TransMilenio, the city-owned governing body that oversees the bus operators running on the network. The group toured the facility and witnessed the operations and its drivers’ training center.

Peñalosa emphasized that a strong political will is needed to execute such a project as it would involve reclaiming land to give priority to mass transport. National government support, especially financially, is also necessary in order to mount such a project.

The ambassador sees how this transport system could work in Manila, noting that Bogotá is like a sister city of Manila in many ways.

“The traffic situation is similar in Bogotá and Manila. The population, too, is almost similar. We have around 12 million inhabitants in Manila while in Bogota, there’s about 10 million. The size of streets, the environment is the same,” Mauro said.

Peñalosa was the proponent of the BRT system in Bogotá during his first term in 1998 to 2000. Since the implementation of the TransMilenio BRT system in 2000, traffic situation in the city has improved and 69 percent of the population is serviced. 

Colombia is among the top Latin American countries with daily ridership of at least three million.

Traffic schemes, P2P buses, carpooling, yellow lane, and no window hours are being implemented by the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority on top of the number coding scheme, but the traffic situation in EDSA continues to get worse. The traffic also robs millions of Filipinos of time that could be spent in a more productive way.