Breaktime: Train, train, go away
The more than 600,000 daily passengers of MRT 3, the light rail transit on the traffic-infested Edsa, are likely to suffer heat and exhaustion for still some time due to the kilometric lines at the stations and the jampacked coaches.
The Aquino (Part II) administration is still taking its sweet time in buying abroad some 48 units of light rail vehicle (LRV), which the government already knew some eight years ago to be the only way to lessen the overcrowding on the Edsa line.
From what I gathered, after years and years of waiting, after so much media ballyhoo of the DOTC, the delivery of the trains will be delayed to a still unknown date sometime in the future.
Yet only recently, the DOTC head himself, Secretary Joseph Emilio Abaya, already proclaimed the good news of salvation for the throngs of Edsa line commuters, promising that the new trains would start arriving by December next year.
From what I gathered, the heroic Abaya made the announcement despite the absence of an official supply contract for those 48 LRV units.
To think, the DOTC set the bidding for the P3.8-billion supply of those 48 LRV units as early as February this year. For some strange reasons that the DOTC never made public, the department postponed the bidding to last April, which was again delayed by a couple of months, with the reasons still a well-kept secret, as the DOTC rescheduled the bidding to last June.
There, all in all, it was already more than four months of delay—just for the freaking bidding! Where was the sense of urgency of the Aquino (Part II) administration?
Now, nobody could say if the prospective bidders just got tired of waiting, but of the seven companies that bought the bidding documents, only two joined the bidding. And they were both companies from China—Dalian Locomotive and Rolling Stock Co. Ltd. and Zhuzhou Electric Locomotive Co. Ltd.
The DOTC subsequently disqualified Zhuzhou for some technical reasons, thus leaving Dalian as the lone bidder, which reportedly did a $2-billion IPO a few years ago, as the group reportedly started to diversify into wind turbine manufacturing with initial investments of $6 billion.
Only last month, from what I gathered, DOTC officials—a battalion of them—trooped to the 200-hectare factory site of Dalian in China for an apparent “site inspection.”
At the same time, some five months after the DOTC held the public bidding in June, our dear DOTC boss, Abaya, announced in media that the DOTC hired an expert, preferably from abroad, to review the bidding process.
Again—that was five months after the actual bidding! It was as if our beloved DOTC wanted the train contract with the Chinese company to go away!
Reportedly hired by the DOTC to look into the terms of reference (TOR) for the P3.8-billion contract was a certain Barry Gardner that, after submitting his expert report, from what I heard, still has yet to receive payment from the DOTC.
Methinks something was wrong in the Abaya equation. I seem to remember that, to make sure the bidding is fair and square, the review of the TOR is always done before the bidding—not way after.
The problem with the Abaya post-bidding delaying tactic was that the DOTC would put the winning bidder, which was the Dalian group of China, at the mercy of a mere consultant, without recourse whatsoever as to who would review his findings.
Really now, DOTC boss Abaya seemed to have surrendered to the consultant the “final” say. In the first place, the review already imperiled the supply contract with more delays, and in this P3.8-billion picked-to-the-bone contract, time should always be crucial to the supplier.
From what I gathered, most of the seven “interested” bidders for the contract backed out precisely because they figured it would be difficult, if not outright impossible, to make even just a small profit from the deal.
For one, the DOTC demanded on the bidders to accept government payments for the trains in pesos—and not dollars—which meant that the supplier would be exposed to foreign exchange risks, particularly after much delay perpetuated by the DOTC itself.
At the time the prospective bidders readied their proposals, for instance, the peso exchange rate was only about P40 per dollar. Today the rate has turned against the peso at almost 44 to a dollar.
Who can say where the rate would be by the time the DOTC, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands of grieving commuters on the Edsa line, finally decided to perfect the contract with the supplier?
From what I gathered, even the winning bidder Dalian already wanted to drop out of the DOTC bidding, deciding just to write off the P75-million in document fees, instead of facing the risk of losing a fortune in the deal.
The usual problem of suppliers such as Dalian is that they already have solid commitments to other customers, so that they have to schedule the production of orders from relatively new buyers like the DOTC.
Each day that the DOTC takes its sweet time is another day of suffering for those poor Edsa line commuters, who happen to be the “bosses” of our leader Benigno Simeon, aka BS. By the way, according to a study done by Jica (Japan International Cooperation Agency), the heavy monstrous traffic in Metro Manila costs businesses P2.4 billion in foregone income.
It did not include of course the human misery! At the moment, our beloved DOTC is busy with public hearings on fare increase for the light rail systems on Edsa and the other two LRT lines of Taft and Aurora.
Recently, it also held a public bidding for the electronic ticketing system. Great—it is talking of huge fare increases and electronic ticketing, while the riding public still suffers from lack of trains.
