A Facebook post by the Department of Transportation (DOTr) on Wednesday celebrated how the last week of February was a glitch-free seven days, where no passengers had to be offloaded.
In cities with better public transportation system, this is probably called a normal week.
In the Philippines, it calls for a Facebook post from the government praising itself for a job well done.
Ok, maybe we can give them some credit? The Metro Rail Transit (MRT) did experience at least 10 glitches a week in 2017, meaning there was basically a glitch every day, sometimes more than once a day according to an analysis by Philippine news website Rappler.
These glitches often result in the offloading of passengers in the middle of the trip and/or extending of waiting times at the already overcrowded stations.
There have also been more dangerous incidents where doors opened and train cars completely decoupled from each other in the middle of the trip.
So a week without glitches is certainly a newsworthy announcement.
The DOTr said the glitch-free week was thanks to the spare train parts that finally arrived in January.
But before this success, they first had to fix old trains, leaving an estimated 500,000 commuters with only three train cars instead of 15.
The trains are supposed to only serve a maximum of 350,000 passengers a day.
Senator Grace Poe, who heads the transportation committee, says that she hopes the spare parts would end the “agony and everyday predicament of long-suffering passengers of the MRT-3.”
We hope so too.
And we hope to get to a place where a week without glitches and accidents is no longer self-praise Facebook status material for government agencies.
