Modernize the PNR
Sponsorship Speech by Sen. Ralph G. Recto
Principal Author of SB 1831
Mr. Senate President, my dear colleagues:
There are only a few times when a bill must be railroaded, and this is one of those.
The charter of the Philippine National Railways will expire on June 20.
If its corporate life is not extended, PNR will be dissolved, its assets sold off, from the carcasses of locomotives which will be sold por kilo, to its vast landholdings which will be auctioned off per square meter.
As senators, we can do two things: Stand on the platform and wave our last goodbye as the dissolution train leaves the station.
Or we can give it a new lease of life, by vowing that PNR’s last trip shall not happen on our watch.
Glorious past, great potential
Mr. President, I will not use the looming deadline in calling for the railroading of this bill.
I would rather dwell on PNR’s glorious past, but more than that, on its great potential because this bill should not be passed for sentimental reasons, but because it is the right thing to do.
In this age of bullet trains, the lumbering PNR coaches we see today may impress us as museum pieces.
From La Union to Albay, we also see the ruins of brick terminals, crumbling bridges, and tracks overgrown with weeds or overrun with houses.
Others have simply disappeared, like the lines in Panay and Cebu, and the spur lines to San Jose, Nueva Ecija; Naic, Cavite; Batangas City; San Quintin in Eastern Pangasinan; Santa Cruz, Laguna.
Routes of lateral lines like the one from Floridablanca to Arayat in Pampanga and from Lipa, Batangas to San Pablo, Laguna can only be traced in old maps.
In Metro Manila, the 12 tranvia lines which fanned into the suburbs have long been buried in asphalt, turned into streets whose names betray their railway origins like Tramo, Pasig Line, Daang Bakal.
Today, train service has shrunk to a 43-kilometer commuter line from Divisoria to Santa Rosa.
But this wasn’t the way it used to be.
Shadow of its old self
At its peak, the Philippine railway system stretched 1,140 kilometers.
Before the war, one can board a train in Lucena before breakfast, switch to another train in Tutuban by lunch, and get off in Dagupan in time for dinner.
And it wasn’t confined to Luzon alone.
In 1907, the 36-kilometer Cebu-Danao line was inaugurated. This was further extended south to Argao.
Five years later, 116 kilometers of railway were already crisscrossing Panay.
But what is impressive was not the expanse of the network, but the speed by which they were built, at a time when builders relied less on mechanized power and more on hordes of manual laborers and herds of carabaos.
Express construction
The first one, a tram line from Manila to Malabon, built by Inigo Zobel’s great-grandfather, was inaugurated in 1888, after two years of construction.
The 196-kilometer Manila-Dagupan line was completed in five years, in 1892, with one section, the 76-kilometer Tarlac to Dagupan, completed in six months, in the midst of the typhoon season.
From groundbreaking to ribbon cutting, the 36-kilometer Cebu-Danao line was completed in 10 months.
Compare this to the more than five years – and counting – struggle to connect the MRT 3 to the LRT 1 in Trinoma.
Or the decade-old Baclaran-Bacoor LRT extension project, comparatively short at 11 kilometers, in which not a single pylon has been driven to the ground.
Ngayon nahihirapan tayong dugtungan ang LRT2 nang apat na kilometro para umabot ito ng Masinag, Antipolo.
Pero alam nyo ba na 100 taon na ang nakakaraan, mayroong Marikina Line mula Manila hanggang San Mateo na may habang 31 kilometro? Na dati-rati kung simba at suman ang trip mo sa Antipolo, pwede kang mag-tren mula Tutuban hanggang Hinulugang Taktak?
1 kilometer in 3 days
It took three days to lay a kilometer of track 122 years ago. Today, it takes months for one rail-related document to move from one table to another.
While one can argue that today’s delays could be due to the engineering challenges in building in urban areas, one cannot say that the difficulty of fording more than 100 rivers from Manila to Dagupan was less exacting.
Or could it be perhaps that red tape wasn’t in existence then?
Or that maybe 19th century contractors were not hamstrung by the procurement hassles that their 21st century counterparts have to confront?
The answer is that the British builders of the Manila-Dagupan road had to fend off bureaucratic meddling and, as their correspondences reveal, had to rely on grease money as a major construction material.
While there is no debate that the PNR is a shadow of its former self, there is also no doubt that it could regain its former self, if not even better.
20 million passengers
Despite plying 43 kilometers, or 1/20th, of its former network, the PNR, like The Little Red Engine That Could, still managed to ferry close to 20 million passengers last year.
Viewed another way, it carried half-a-million busloads of passengers a year, easing congestion in Metro Manila’s parking lots, otherwise known as streets.
The ridership was achieved on a sparsely distanced 2.5 trips per direction per hour.
Thus, just doubling the number of trains would mean increasing the number of its passengers to 40 million annually – equivalent to 1 million bus trips.
Last year’s farebox income was P234 million, or an average of P11 per passenger.
Government subsidy was pegged at 11 pesos a passenger, an amount ¼ the government subsidy for an MRT rider.
Big landowner
While its rolling stock of hand-me-downs are few, PNR’s main assets are its land, mainly the 800-kilometer La Union-Legazpi carriageway, plus the stations along the route, including Tutuban which now doubles as a mall.
Ang PNR po ay panginoong maylupa. Subalit ito rin ang landlord ng napakaraming informal dwellers. Maraming mga lupa nito ay napatituluhan na.
The great train robbery in Philippine history did not happen on board PNR trains. It happened on the ground, when the land on which the tracks are laid ended up in private hands.
On paper, its land is presently valued at P40 billion, or comprising 80% of its total assets of P52 billion.
Hindi pa po kasama dito ang “air rights” kasi kung papatungan, halimbawa, ng elevated expressway ang ating mga daang bakal, ang espasyong iyan ay pag-aari pa rin ng PNR.
As to liabilities, PNR reported P23 billion last year.
Solution to P137 B problem
Mr. President:
We are nearing traffic Armageddon.
This is not something we read on the papers but experience on the road everyday.
When it is faster to fly across an ocean than to travel across town, when Senator Pia can finish a marathon faster than her car can drive the same distance, then we know we are in trouble.
In Metro Manila, where majority of the country’s seven million vehicles are, a 20 kilometer-per-hour crawl is considered overspeeding.
It has gone from bad to worse that one study pegged the economic and health losses to Metro Manila traffic at P137 billion.
And traffic is no longer a Metro Manila disease. Average travel time on Luzon’s major highways has considerably slowed down.
The problem is that our roads are past their carrying capacity.
When motorists bound for Bulacan or Laguna steam in traffic which hardly moves, while hardly any train is seen on the railroad parallel to the road, then it is time to let our trains carry more load.
When the queue to the MRT is as long as the distance to be travelled, then it is time to maximize the underutilized asset that is the PNR.
Kung mag-eeroplano ka naman galing Bicol o Tuguegarao, traffic na rin sa himpapawid.
When planes spend more time circling above or idling on the runway, then it is time to develop rail as an alternative.
Extend franchise, expand service
This bill shouldn’t simply extend the franchise of PNR but should expand its services.
Because any gain from renewing PNR’s charter will be forfeited if it will not be rehabilitated.
This bill is not a license to continue with bad service. Rather, it is a concession to improve it. This is not about putting the PNR on the same old track, but on the fast track.
We must attach conditionalities and targets to the franchise extension. Otherwise, we will just be changing the expiry date of a can of milk without changing its already stale contents.
Railroad coalition
Mr. President:
The birth of PNR coincided with the birth of our nation. PNR was the revolution’s official carrier.
Delegates to the country’s first parliament, the Malolos Congress, were ferried by the same trains which earlier transported soldiers to battlefields where they won our freedom.
Our fathers enjoyed the comforts of PNR. We may have not. But it is not too late for our children to enjoy them.
But for this to happen, like all journeys, it must begin with a simple step, and in the case of PNR, it is for members of the Senate, from both sides of the aisle, to come together as One Railroad Coalition.
Mr. President, let us go full speed ahead.
