The Department of Transportation and Communications (DoTC) has blamed the frequent breakdown of Metro Rail Transit (MRT) trains on lax rules in the maintenance provider’s contract with the government that gave too much leeway and left many technical problems unchecked.
In a statement Thursday, Transportation Secretary Manuel “Mar” Roxas II said he would order a renegotiation of the MRT’s build-lease-transfer (BLT) contract to improve provisions on maintenance that would ensure passengers were served properly.
Roxas said the BLT contract signed in 1997 was “no longer responsive to the present maintenance requirements” of the MRT line. The BLT contract expires in 2022.
Roxas said that under the existing BLT agreement, the DoTC was in charge of the operations of the train line while Metro Railway Transit Corp. (MRTC), made up of private shareholders, was responsible for the maintenance.
Roxas said the MRTC sub-contracted maintenance work to the local unit of Japanese industrial conglomerate Sumitomo, which in turn hired TES-Philippines (TES-P). DoTC then reimburses MRTC for the overall cost of maintenance.
But under the BLT agreement, MRTC was only required to make sure that 18 trains were running at any given time before any penalties were to be handed out. The DoTC said this was fine when the train line first opened. But today, due to heavy passenger traffic, a minimum of 23 trains were needed at the train line at any given time.
This was already more than the MRT’s fleet of 20 trains. Close to 500,000 passengers take the MRT every day, or much higher than its original capacity of 350,000.
Roxas said the terms of the BLT would be renegotiated to ensure that maintenance would be a bigger priority.
In the meantime, he directed MRT officials to put more pressure on MRTC and Sumitomo to be more vigilant in implementing preventive rather than curative maintenance action to avoid service interruptions.
Roxas said he has also ordered an upgrade the train line’s signaling software system. The system currently in place, he said, was an obsolete DOS-based platform sensitive to power fluctuations. When the Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) collapses, it takes a longer time to reboot and normalize train operations.
The former senator, who assumed office as DoTC head last month, said the MRT line was still one of the safest and most affordable ways to commute in Metro Manila. He said warning systems that were meant to halt train operations at the first sign of potentially “catastrophic” technical problems have worked well.
“The safety of the riding public is our primordial concern. The several incidents in the past few days, which arose from automatic safety triggers, showed that the safety protocols are working to prevent potentially catastrophic incidents,” Roxas said.
“Nonetheless, these should not be a convenient excuse for hiding behind lapses in operational maintenance,” Roxas added.