DOTr receives unsolicited proposals for MRT-11 and C5 rail projects

Transportation Secretary Jaime Bautista on Wednesday announced that his department has received unsolicited proposals to develop two new railway systems for Metro Manila.

“We are in the process of identifying other railway lines. There are four operating lines now; the next operating line will be MRT-7. There is an unsolicited proposal for MRT-11, which is from Monumento to San Jose del Monte. We are evaluating this unsolicited proposal…There is also a proposal to have an MRT along C5,” Bautista said during the Management Association of the Philippines (MAP) general membership meeting in Taguig City.

Pressed for more details, the Transportation chief said the proposed MRT-11 project is a build-operate-transfer (BOT) unsolicited proposal.

He said the Department of Transportation (DOTr) is planning to finish the review of the proposal “within the year.”

“We will review and compare the documents. We will review it since it is an unsolicited proposal, it will be subjected to a Swiss challenge,” he said.

The DOTr chief said the MRT-11 may be connected to the ongoing MRT-7, which will run from North Avenue in Quezon City to Tala in San Jose del Monte, Bulacan.

The original proponent status could be awarded to the project’s proponent, whose identity Bautista declined to disclose, by “next year.”

On the proposed C5 Railway Project or the MRT-10 line, Bautista said it will run through the Circumferential Road 5 (C5) to connect Ninoy Aquino International Airport Terminal 3 in Pasay City all the way to Taguig City.

“There’s a proposal, but it’s still not complete yet,” the Transportation chief said.

The Cabinet official, during the forum, said there are other railway projects which are undergoing feasibility studies and are subject for the National Economic and Development Authority’s (NEDA) approval.

“There are plans to have a railway in Cavite and we will extend the railway up to Batangas… these are in the pipeline. We are just completing the feasibility studies,” Bautista said.

“We also have plans to put up rail in Leyte, Panay Island, also in Cebu… There are more railway systems that we will implement in the coming years,” he said.

The Transportation chief said the agency is also planning to privatize the operations of the Light Rail Transit (LRT) Line 2 and MRT-3 in two years.

“We plan to privatize the operations of LRT-2 and MRT-3 in 2025. We have already engaged the ADB [Asian Development Bank] to help us identify who will be a good operator for LRT-2 and MRT-3. The MRT-3 is on an existing build-lease-transfer [BLT] with a private group and this will end in 2025 so when the BLT arrangement is finished, we can privatize the operations of LRT-2 and MRT-3. So that will be in 2025,” he said.

For his part, Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) chief representative to the Philippines Sakamoto Takema said the Japanese government is eager to help the Philippines build more railways.

“JICA is very happy to support some sort of selection. Metro Manila is having the same rush area as that of Tokyo, and yet there are only four railway lines. In Tokyo, I cannot count how many lines we have. The size of the area is just the same and the population of Metro Manila is 1.5x bigger than that of Tokyo, but still there are only 4 lines. That’s why JICA is very supportive of DOTr because we need more,” Sakamoto said. — BM, GMA Integrated News