High hope for Cebu LRT project

CEBU CITY – Presidential Assistant for the Visayas Michael Lloyd Dino expressed optimism that the Metro Cebu and the Light Rail Transit (LRT) project would materialize now that Cebu province and Cebu City have new elected leaders belonging to the same political party.

Dino also assured Cebuanos that the Metro Cebu Development Authority (MCDA) may soon have its “breath of life” because the province now has a new governor, Gwendolyn Garcia, and Edgardo Labella as new Cebu City mayor.

Garcia is Cebu’s 3rd district congresswoman while Labella is Cebu City’s vice mayor and both won in the midterm polls. Dino said the LRT project may be operational before President Rodrigo Duterte’s term ends in 2022. The Metro Cebu Development and Coordinating Board (MCDCB) pushed for the approval of an executive order creating MCDA that will act as the overall body to oversee services that have multi-local government unit or metropolitan-wide coverage.

The MCDA will also formulate, coordinate, regulate and monitor the short, medium, and long-term plans, policies, and programs for the sustainable development and integration of Metropolitan Cebu Area. Dino said the construction of the LRT would start soon after the approval of its feasibility study by the National Economic and Development Authority.

He said the national government would likely help Cebu, now that local government officials here are united and have the same vision of development as Duterte.

“President Rodrigo Duterte, as promised, wanted to refocus infrastructure projects from only in Luzon to Visayas, specifically Cebu City and Cebu Province,” he said, adding, the LRT, as mass transport backbone of Metro Cebu, will serve the Cebuanos from end-to-end under the Department of Transportation’s Integrated Inter-modal Transport System (IITS). Garcia, for her part, expressed support to the IITS project, saying that she believed the solution to traffic can be solved through coordination of the towns and cities in the metropolis.

She said the traffic problem is not limited only to Cebu City. Metro Cebu has three independent cities, Cebu, Mandaue and Lapu-Lapu, and four component cities namely Danao, Talisay, Naga, and Carcar with 6 municipalities Compostela, Lilo-an, Consolacion, and Cordova in the North, and Minglanila and San Fernando in the South with 2.849 million in population spread all throughout 349 villages. (John Rey Saavedra)

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