During the early days of the Duterte administration, one of the initial pronouncements of then-newly appointed Secretary Arthur P. Tugade was the idea of cable cars to help mitigate the transport and traffic problems in the country. This was met with a lot of skepticism, and some with ridicule by a lot of people, including some of our prominent transport planners. But rather than shelve it off, the department fortunately moved forward and two years later, cable cars as part of the government’s transport solutions might soon become a possiblity.
Though cable or gondola cars, were being used even before rails at the turn of the 18thcentury—mostly for mining and mountainous towns, it was not until the 20th century that they became a serious mass transport solution. This was in Medellin, Colombia, a country known for out-of-the box transport and traffic solutions, such as the Bus Rapid Transit System, or BRT, which has now, like the cable cars, gained a good following in China, South Korea, Indonesia and countries in South America, Africa and Europe.
Cable cars are good mass transport alternatives, especially in developing countries like the Philippines where the need to have an immediate and low cost solution is present. Cable cars are fast and easy to build. If all conditions and requirements are met, it would take only a year for it to be operational after a detailed engineering study is done. One reason is the small infra footprint cable cars require compared to rail, or even subway, as the space it mostly occupies is the airspace above, which is less disputable than ground properties or the much contested right-of-ways that is plaguing most of our major transport infrastructures implementation in the Philippines. This adds to making cable cars among the cheapest to build. Subways cost highest at billions of pesos per kilometer and light rails at hundreds of millions of pesos per kilometer. On the other hand, cable cars cost less at a little over P50 million per kilometer. Carriage is also comparable with the bigger cable cars, or “gondolas,” carrying as much as 6,000 passengers per hour, or reaching 100,000 passengers on a similar time run by the Light Rail Transit (LRT). And similar to modern rail, cable cars leave a better carbon footprint than road transport as they run on electricity. One unfounded concern about cable cars would be its viability during typhoons. It can run up to 60-kilometer per hour winds, which is fairly strong. Besides, there are also weather restrictions on other modes of transport and this can be best approached by applying the required safety standards. Cable cars are also great in areas where railways and even traditional road highways, are difficult to build, such as traversing mountains and wide bodies of water to connect communities. And in the Colombia experience, such transport connectivity injected economic, as well as social alleviation, in these once hard-to- reach communities.
In the Philippines, the Department of Transportation has pinpointed areas where cable car transport can immediately be implemented. A foreign grant initiated by the DOTR has already done the initial studies for Baguio City where definitely cable cars would work best than other forms of mass transport. With the present thrust of new Baguio City Mayor Benjamin Magalong to push for a traffic and pollution-free city, the idea of cable cars in the Pine City has been embraced fully well with the possibility that this becomes a PPP project of the city itself. Other potential cable car applications in the country would be in Iloilo, connecting to the province of Guimaras, Davao City and Samal Island; additional transport mode between Cebu and Mactan; and in Metro Manila, connecting the mountain cities and municipalities of Rizal, such as Antipolo to Marikina as a feeder transport line to LRT 2, or direct to Pasig and Makati.
With less than three years left of this administration, an idea that was not taken seriously by the public at the start, this maybe one of those projects that can be implemented within the President’s term. It maybe that Tugade was right all along.
Thomas Tim Orbos was former DOTr undersecretary for roads, and general manager of the MMDA. He is currently undertaking further studies at the McCourt School of Public Policy of Georgetown University. He can be reached via e-mail at thomas_orbos@sloan.mit.edu