By Mike Frialde (The Philippine Star) Updated November 28, 2010
MANILA, Philippines - The Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA) is looking into the possibility of adapting Jakarta’s TransJakarta express bus lane system to address the problem of congestion along EDSA.
According to MMDA chairman Francis Tolentino, his agency sent a team to Jakarta to explore the viability of the system as one of several possible measures to alleviate the problem of traffic congestion along the 24-kilometer main highway of Metro Manila.
Tolentino said the existing “yellow bus lanes” along EDSA could be modified to make it similar to Jakarta’s bus lanes.
Tolentino said buses in Jakarta using the TransJakarta bus lane could not weave in and out of traffic along the highway as their lane is not only in the middle of the highway, it is also separated from the rest of the highway’s lanes by concrete blocks.
“Buses cannot leave the lane as they will be separated from the rest of the traffic by a concrete divider instead of a yellow lane,” he said.
Tolentino added should the plan materialize, buses along EDSA can only stop at designated elevated terminals or bus stops, similar to the ones now being used in Jakarta.
But unlike buses in Jakarta that have special wide doors which are the same height as the terminal gates, buses plying EDSA will have to have the first step of the “estribo” or running board removed.
By removing the first step of the estribo, Tolentino said passengers can only board and alight the bus on the designated elevated stops or terminals as the second step would then be of the same height as the platform of the elevated stop.
“We will have to remove the first step and align the platform of the station with the bus’s second step,” he said.
Like in Jakarta, the concrete divider bordering the bus lane would ensure that buses along EDSA would run in a straight lane from one terminal to the next.
For nearly a week now, MMDA executives have been meeting behind closed doors with experts in the transportation and urban planning sectors to come out with doable proposals to solve EDSA’s traffic problems.
The viable proposals will be made public by the MMDA on Dec. 3, Tolentino said.
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