Transportation Secretary Jun Abaya said the new coach for the Metro Rail Transit Line 3 (MRT-3) that arrived on Sun, Jan 17, is expected to ease train congestion. The coach is the second one to arrive out of the 48 coaches the government has ordered.
Abaya said, “It should increase our capacity by 67 percent once we get the original coaches. There are like 72, 73 (coaches) plus 48, so we should be able to bring up our daily capacity to around 800,000 to 900,000 a day.”
“However, Abaya said the new coach procured from China still needs to be tested and certified before it can be used by the public, hopefully by the end of March,” reports ABS-CBN News.
The report noted: “Abaya said another coach is expected to arrive this month and in February, while four coaches will come in every month starting March until December or January next year.”
Abaya clarified, though, “that the new coaches for MRT-3 are meant for capacity expansion and not for rehabilitation.”
“It has nothing to do with rehabilitation. This is the capacity expansion, which really this should have been procured in the middle of 2000, a clear responsibility of the owner of the MRT-3 but one way or another because of avoidance or finger-pointing… At least this administration has brought in new MRT trains 15 years since its operation,” Abaya quipped.
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