President Benigno Aquino III earned more than a hundred
round of applause last Monday, July 27, 2015 when he delivered his sixth and
most probably final State of the Nation Address (SONA).
It lasted for two hours
and 15 minutes, the longest SONA speech that he’s ever had in his five years of
service.
President Aquino never seemed to get tired of showing his
outburst against the the previous administration.
This year’s SONA showcased the achievements of the
government with regards to employment, wages, taxes and revenues, national
security, disaster preparedness, public and private infrastructures,
transportation, communication, peace, national budget and different variety of
reforms.
One of the sectors which President Aquino claimed to have
already been taken good care of by them was the transportation sector.
Those
who have heard or seen the SONA 2015 may find it hard to accept that
transportation in our country especially in Metro Manila is currently doing
well.
How could they convince themselves to believe in Aquino’s
sugarcoated words when there are apparently bunches of problems and failures in
the transportation sector that the government still have to deal with?
Take for example the case of MRT 3 which is continuously
drawing a lot of flak from most Filipino commuters because of a series of
accidents. One of the most notable MRT incidents happened last August 2014 when
a train got derailed which rendered a dozen of injured rail users.
This raised
the doubt about the integrity of our train systems, despite of the findings
that it was caused by human error. That may just be a smokescreen in order to
hide the faulty and miserable condition of the MRT 3.
Fortunately, DOTC acted quickly by slowing down the trains
and trimming down the trains’ operations from the usual 20 to only 7 trains
until the new train which were ordered from China finally arrived.
Because of
these wretched occurrences, the fare hike which was implemented by the end of
2014, was not fully justified and was considered unreasonable after all. The
fare hike was intended to raise the budget for the development of
transportation infrastructure which isn’t clearly visible up until now.
President Aquino discussed little to no solution for the MRT
3 chaos during his most recent SONA. The only thing that he said was, for the
unresolved MRT crisis, there is already a plan of buying new MRT train coaches
and getting new MRT railways.
However, he failed to reveal the exact timeline
of the project so there is no reason for us to expect too much from his fancy
speech about transportation.
Oh and by the way, he indirectly praised his
administration for the successful upgrade of the signaling and automatic fare
collecting or ticketing system just a few weeks ago.
Filipino commuters weren’t
really pleased by such development as it does pretty much nothing in solving
the transportation woes that they have been experiencing on a daily basis.
