Touted to be the country’s first green hybrid expressway, the Pasig River Expressway (PAREX) places the environment and the river’s eco-system at the front and center of this ambitious initiative.
IN the mid-80s, Colonel Mariano Santiago, then the boss of the Land Transportation Commission (LTC) told me during one of my occasional chats with him: “We now have about a million vehicles all over the country. That includes those still unregistered… and the National Capital Region (NCR) accounts for at least 30 percent of the national total.”
33 years hence, in 2018, the number of registered vehicles nationwide rocketed to 11.6 million, an increase of over 1,000 percent from the estimated 1985 figure of one million.
The NCR accounted for at least 24 percent at 2.8 million units.
It was one statistic that had never drifted into Director Santiago’s imagination.
And maybe, even the government traffic planners in those days had never imagined that the vehicle inventory in the metropolis could balloon to this level.
The number of new cars being launched yearly into the roads and avenues of Metro Manila had increased with the improved incomes from the employment of many Metro Manilans.
Already, as early as 1980, the Marcos government was witnessing the growing traffic problems triggered by the soaring number of vehicles.
Mass rail transit system
Along with plans to open up improved roads and bridges to ease daily traffic congestions, President Marcos paved the way for the setting up of a light rail system.
On July 12, 1980, the President created the Light Rail Transit Authority (LRTA) under Executive Order No. 603 giving birth to the “Metrorail”.
Its mission was to create a fully integrated mass rail transit system network to ease Metro Manila’s serious traffic congestion.
Still, the LRT solution to the traffic congestions fell short of expectation as the soaring number of people in the metropolis needed more and more public transport to shuttle them to work in the morning and bring them home at night.
Traffic woes
From the 5.9 million residents in 1980, their number soared to 13.92 million last year, up 136 percent.
One reason the demand for more spaces in public buses, jeepneys, taxis, and FX services became a matter of daily survival for every breadwinner.
However, a year before, in 1999, the government launched the Manila Metro Rail Transit System (MRT), one of the two rapid transit systems serving Metro Manila along with the LRT, and became fully operational in 2010.
It aimed to encourage car users to leave their cars at home and instead take the mass transport system. Still, Metro Manila’s traffic woes were far from over.
Flyover bridges and elevated interchanges rose all over the metropolis to provide new grounds for the endlessly multiplying number of vehicles that fought for every inch of the city road.
Bridges’ inadequate capacity
Some noted that one of the major factors contributing to the inefficiency of Metro Manila’s road network is the inadequate capacity of the existing 30 bridges crossing major waterways, namely Pasig River, Marikina River, and the Manggahan Floodway.
These bridges accommodate 1.3 million vehicles per day.
Right now, the government is working on the funding of three new bridges that will cross the Marikina River as part of an effort to solve the increasingly severe traffic problem.
The proposed bridges await funding from the Asian Development Bank and construction should start early 2022.
Major thoroughfares
OVER the past 50 years, only two major thoroughfares were built in what is now known as Mega Manila, running their courses from east to west.
These roads are the Marcos Highway that runs from Cogeo, Antipolo City in Rizal, to Katipunan Road in Quezon City, and the Ortigas Avenue, from Cainta, Rizal to San Juan City.
Ortigas Avenue was built towards in the late 60s (as a second-year UE student, I saw the finishing works of the avenue near Gilmore Street in San Juan city in 1967).
The Marcos Highway was an old road known as Highway 55 (of the colonial American era) that started in Manila.
But in recent years, it was remodeled, starting from the Katipunan Road in Quezon City, and has stretched up to Cogeo, Antipolo; Infanta, Quezon; and Santa Maria, Laguna.
So Marcos Highway and Ortigas Avenue stood as the only two major thoroughfares from the eastern side of Rizal spanning towards the metropolis.
No new roads
One reason was that there were no available properties that could be expropriated by the government of the day.
To do it these days would mean a costly exercise of demolishing thousands of homes and commercial and business establishments to make way for a new road project.
And if ever there were road projects carried out by the government in recent times, they ran only from east to west for short distances and whose course went across areas with fewer residents and business enterprises being affected.
Just like their problematic counterpart EDSA, or the Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, a 23-kilometer long avenue whose tip ends in Caloocan City while its tail touches the Roxas Boulevard in Pasay City, the Marcos Highway and the Ortigas Avenue are also plagued with traffic congestion problems.
Enter PAREX
THE GOOD NEWS is that a new joint venture company has proposed to end the woes of Metro Manilans using EDSA, Marcos Highway, and Ortigas Avenue.
Food and beverage giant San Miguel Corporation, through its subsidiary company SMC Infrastructure and the Philippine National Construction Corporation (PNCC), have joined forces to build a new road system that would relieve the metropolis of its present-day traffic congestions.
This P95 billion road system is called the Pasig River Expressway (PAREX) that according to the project proponents, would offer a “permanent solution” to the daily woes of commuters and motorists in the metropolis.
A modern concept in today’s setting of unclogging city streets and avenues, PAREX will be a 19.73km elevated six-lane expressway that will take off at Radial Road 10 at the North Harbor in the city of Manila and ends at a connection to South East Metro Manila Expressway at C-6.
To rise along the banks of Pasig River with its giant pillars encroaching only on one or two meters of the river, PAREX will cut to only 15 minutes the travel time from Manila to Rizal.
Once the road project is finished, PAREX will comprise three segments. Segment 1 will cover R-10 to Plaza Azul which is around 5.74-km.
Then from Plaza Azul, the planned expressway will link up with San Juran River via the Metro Manila Skyway Stage 3 – which will span about 2.7-km. Segment 2 will measure 7.325-km and will see the expressway connecting from the San Juan River to C5 Intersection.
Finally, Segment 3 will bridge C-5 Intersection with C-6 Intersection and span about 6.3-km.
Environment friendly
Touted to be the country’s first green hybrid expressway, PAREX places the environment and the river’s eco-system at the front and center of this ambitious initiative.
While providing travelers and motorists with a modern, efficient expressway, SMC will also undertake the clean-up and rehabilitation of the Pasig River alongside PAREX.
Already, SMC has earmarked P 2 billion for the extraction of some three million tons of silt and solid waste from the river to improve its carrying capacity and flow.
This would prevent flooding and improve the water quality of the river.
SMC project planners are confident that a rehabilitated river would make possible the safe use of the river as a mode of transportation.
Criticisms
The project, however, was met with criticism and skepticism.
Environmentalist groups have called on the government to evaluate further the effects of the PAREX project on the overall ecosystem along its 19-km stretch before allowing it to proceed.
Much better, scrap it all along for just being a new, gigantic eyesore stretching across the city.
They pointed out that PAREX will remove much of the vehicles from EDSA, Ortigas Avenue, and Marcos Highway alongside the tons of fumes they produce and transfer them to its 19-kilometer concrete structure where they would create a new launching pad to pollute the environment.
Because of the ease in traveling over the new elevated expressway, over time, more and more Metro Manilans will buy new cars, thus contributing further to road congestions in the city.
Pure conjectures
However, SMC branded the accusations as pure conjectures, just like hooking up the kabayo behind the kalesa.
“It’s part of an orchestrated and continuing demolition job to paint the project as the opposite of what it truly is,” the company said of the negative reaction it has been getting since PAREX was launched in a recent groundbreaking ceremony.
SMC also belied the idea that PAREX “will kill Pasig River, that the structure will cover the waterway, that the project is anti-poor, and that the new piece of infrastructure will worsen traffic and pollution”.
Biologically dead
“Pasig river is already considered biologically dead and is a flowing dumpsite for solid waste, industrial and chemical wastes, and sewage.”
“We are spending P2 billion to remove three million metric tons of wastes as part of our rehabilitation efforts to enable Pasig River to channel floodwaters more effectively and improve the operations of water ferries” the firm said.
SMC then clarified that PAREX will not cover the entire Pasig River, saying the structure’s posts will only take up a meter of the river’s 200-meter average width.
Public transport too
According to SMC, the expressway will benefit more than just private car owners as it will accommodate public transportation as well.
This includes a bus rapid transit system that will connect PAREX to the Skyway, allowing for “faster, more reliable, safer, comfortable and affordable commutes to and from the northern, southern, eastern, and western areas of Metro Manila.
“It is not expressways that induce people to buy more cars. It is insufficient public transportation, pollution, and even personal progress of people,” the statement stressed.
“The number of vehicles will continue to rise with or without PAREX. Traffic and pollution will worsen if we do not build efficient, multipurpose, future-ready infrastructure such as the PAREX.”
Indeed, PAREX is brilliant idea that has finally come in concrete, living color to save the day for us.
And the opposition? Again, they are too late in coming if they wanted to save Pasig River from its virtual built-in pollution.
Tags: #tollroads, #SanMiguelCorporation, #PasigRiver, #PAREX