Toll for subway

Monday, 30 November 2009 19:18

VEHICLE owners in Cebu City may find themselves stopped and paying at a toll gate when the kilometer-long subway section of the Cebu South Coastal Road opens early next year, as public-works officials and representatives of the Japanese contractor said there is no budget to pay for the equipment and utilities to run the facility.

The project manager from Japanese contractor Kajima Corp. told government and private-sector planners that although they have a one-year warranty period and maintenance obligation after the project is completed, this does not include payment for the bills.

“We will maintain the road and facilities, but Visayan Electric Co. payment is not included in the contract,” project manager Hikonari Maeda told a meeting at the National Economic and Development Authority.

Project managers from the Metro Cebu Development Project reported that construction of the P1.162-billion subway is 77-percent complete as of October 2009.

Central Visayas Regional Development Council  infrastructure-development committee chairman Emmanuel Rabacal said the body may decide in the future whether to impose a toll on the subway for the maintenance cost.

“We need to raise money if only for maintenance,” Rabacal said.

The toll issue is not the first in Metro Cebu. A few years back, officials of Mandaue City and Lapu-Lapu City refused to foot the bill for the lights and the maintenance of the Marcelo Fernan Bridge (second Mactan Bridge). The provincial government was forced to step in and sell advertising billboard spots on the bridge to pay for maintenance.

The subway is the last installment of the 12-kilometer Cebu South Coastal Road, which straddles the 240- hectare reclaimed Cebu South Road Properties, exiting in Talisay City in the south. The two projects are funded by the Japan Bank for International Cooperation.        

The subway goes underground near the Office of the President in Cebu and the historic Plaza Independencia just beside Fort San Pedro, the country’s first Spanish fortification. The project required the transplantation of several centuries and medium-growth trees from the park as well as initial excavation from government and academic archaeologists to clear the way before heavy equipment comes in for the dig.

The subway has been installed with a mechanical ventilation system, an emergency power generator and water pumps, project managers said. Although estimates indicated that there is no need to run the ventilation system in the first two to three years of the project, Kajima engineers said the expected growth in traffic volume will require ventilation and the projected 67,000 kilowatt-hours of power consumption every year.