Source:  Business Mirror, 13 February 2012

 

THE Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) on Monday announced that it will put on the auction block by the middle of this year a contract to operate and maintain a common ticketing system for Metro Manila’s three light railway systems.

Secretary Mar Roxas made this announcement ahead of the issuance of the bid invites that will signal the formal acceptance of proposals from interested parties.

The project, upon implementation, will allow commuters taking the Metro Rail Transit (MRT) 3 at Edsa and the Light Rail Transit (LRT) 1 and 2 along Taft-Rizal Avenue and Magsaysay-Aurora Boulevard, respectively, to use a single ticket when boarding the three light rail systems.

This also means that commuters need not purchase different tickets when changing train lines.

“Para minsanan na lang at hindi doble-gastos sa gobyerno, at saka sa mga sumasakay, we will bid out a Common Ticketing System Project, a design-build-operate-and-maintain project [BOT], under the BOT Law.  This will roughly [cater to]… 1 million passengers a day, for the Yellow, Green and Blue train lines,” Roxas said in a press conference.

The MRT Line 3 will be renamed the yellow line. The colors green and blue be used as color codes for LRT Line 1 and 2, respectively.  “This will enable our passengers to easily identify which train line they should take because in the future we envision all lines to be interconnected,” said Roxas.

The tickets could also be used as payment to purchase goods, including cellphone load credits, at convenience stores. Moreover, these can be used in ATMs to withdraw cash.

“It’s more of a stored value ticket that can be used anywhere. It is not only the ticket manufacturers that can participate in the bidding, even the business community can partner with banks and join the auction,” said Roxas.

The common ticketing system concept is similar to Hong Kong’s Octopus stored value ticket with a microchip that allows the holder of the ticket to tap up the value of the ticket once it runs out of value. The ticket is similar to an ATM card which can be used to purchase items in convenience stores.

Since the ticket will have an e-banking component, Roxas said the bidder must partner with local financial institutions, telecom and technology organizations, and retail and department stores where the card can be used to purchase items and services aside from train rides.

In the same briefing, Roxas announced that the government will put out to bid the design to build-and-operate and the Operations and Maintenance of the LRT 1 project in April.

“The contract is worth P35 billion because it consists only of the civil works, which excludes the rolling stock,” he said.

The LRT Line 1 extension project will run from Baclaran all the way to Cavite. It will be a 12-kilometer railway system that aims to serve about 40,000 passengers a day.