Manila, Philippines--An all-Philippine private consortium has joined forces with some government support to put together a $91 million busway system in metropolitan Manila, which will become operational early next year.
The Philtrak project will operate along the C-5 corridor in metropolitan Manila and is expected to carry some 180,000 people daily. It is seen as a major step in relieving the capital's endemic traffic congestion.
An integral part of the government's plan to relieve the country's urban transport problems, Philtrak will get underway using 110 brand new, high-capacity, low floor, articulated Volvo buses, supported by an equal number of shuttle buses. The vehicles will carry passengers to stops along the 22-mile C-5 Bus Rapid Transit corridor that starts at the Taguig Terminal in metropolitan Manila.
The project is making maximum use of local components and assembly processes. Del Monte Motor Works has made the bus bodies; Micrologic Systems will install the intelligent ticketing system including contactless farecards; and Versatech will work on traffic engineering problems.
The coming Manila BRT is envisioned as a total departure from the undisciplined, polluting, and accident-prone vehicles that have characterized urban transport in Manila and the nation's other major cities. The Volvo engines have been tested to have the lowest emissions in their class, and the stations along the environmentally friendly BRT will be equipped with efficient garbage collection and recycling systems. This is in line with Philtrak's announced policy of running a business whose employees take care of their surroundings.
To emphasize the "green" character of the new transit system, its initial 450 employees will be designated as "earth carers" and its drivers as "earth pilots." The vehicles will be equipped with Global Positioning System sensors and controlled from a command center by a state-of-the-art bus location system. More than a third of the employees, 162, will be recruited from among persons with disabilities, who will be trained in an intensive company-run program.
According to a Philtrak announcement, the Manila BRT is intended to move mass transit into a higher and more disciplined, self-regulated level of operations: "Our integrated bus operation seeks to provide the public with a safe and dependable mass transit system that does not overspeed, overtake, illegally load and unload, swerve, block, pollute or cause unnecessary accidents or traffic jams."
Elsewhere in the Asia-Pacific region, Auckland, the largest city in New Zealand, is in the midst of planning a busway project to relieve pressure on the North Shore corridor, which is packed with 165,000 vehicles each workday.
In Japan, the Toyota Motor Corporation has just started trial runs for its "intelligent multi-mode transit system" (IMTS), which builds on but moves beyond the Curitiba, Brazil, busway model, on its one-mile Shizuoka test track. IMTS will couple up to six environmentally friendly, low floor Shino Yamada buses together for service along dedicated corridor segments. The buses are fueled by liquefied natural gas and can be uncoupled quickly to run on regular roads and to adjust to changes in demand.
IMTS uses the latest in Intelligent Transportation Systems technologies, such as lane maintenance by detection of magnetic nails and detection of forward obstructions, including fixed distance maintenance between "bus trains," by extreme high frequency radar.
The low floor "stepless" buses will operate with a newly developed, low-emission compressed natural gas engine. The vehicles themselves are based on currently mass-produced bus models and can be serviced and maintained at regular bus service stations, eliminating the need for construction of specialized maintenance facilities.
As the system's operation requires neither rails nor electric power lines, construction and maintenance costs are much lower than conventional railway-based or other new transport systems.
Potential uses of IMTS include connecting airports, intermodal terminals, and resort areas with neighboring cities or residential neighborhoods affected by major fluctuations in demand, along with providing medium-volume transportation between provincial cities.
The system can handle up to about 20,000 passengers an hour per direction.
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