Davao City eyes new transport system for near 1M commuters daily

 

DAVAO CITY –A city councilor here said the city gave the green signal to firm up options on a sustainable transport system after a Japan-funded study found a messed up transportation network where some high-density areas were found to have few public transport to serve them.

Councilor Leonardo Avila III said initial study showed that an average of 800,000 persons commute daily in the city, whose public transport routes were found to overlap in certain areas, but mainly in the poblacion area, and leaving 51 barangays with either poor transport service or non at all.

Avila said that the City Council would wait for the final result of the sustainable urban transport study, the brief of which was presented to the Davao City Chamber of Commerce and industry and other private parties on September 30 at the Marco Polo Hotel here.

The study listed three sets of “challenges” confronting decision-makers in the city government, some issues of which involved important policy structures, such as the land use policy, infrastructure and allocation of financial resources.

It found out that the “large number of vehicles [are] difficult to regulate or manage, and is often the cause of traffic congestion”. The city has a total number of vehicles reaching 15,115, of which the jeepneys and Filcab, or the small-sized multicabs (7,278), taxi (3,602) and motorized tricycles (3,105) were regulated by the city, and the buses (664) and airconditioned vans (466) were regulated by the Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board and the Land Transportation Office.

The overlapping routes of these vehicles have turned many poblacion streets into difficult traffic gridlock as drivers compete for passengers and block or slow down traffic flow, and leave some high density residential areas with few public vehicles, such as those in the Toril area.

In its presentation, proponents of the study said that in the southwesternmost district of Toril, 21 barangays have poor public transport service and another 20 barangays have not been served by jeepneys.

It said that this was a case of a poorly served or unserved high-density area, with 412,000 residents, comprising a third of the proposed concentrated urbanized area in the western side of the city.

Avila said that at certain hours of the day, one third of the 800,000 commuters could not find a ride for as long as three hours of waiting. He said this happens during the evening rush hours.

And recently with the regular rains that send floods to the major thoroughfares, a bigger number of commuters would be seen waiting for hours to take a ride as the Filcabs, or the multicabs, either opt to go home or get their vehicles stuck in waist-deep waters.

Avila said that options for a proposed transportation system include buses along major routes and establishing a bicycle lane to cut reliance on fossil fuels.

“What’s clear with the study is that it tells us that it is already time to do something,” he said.

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