JTTRI International Seminar on"Railway and Area Development in Manila"
Mr. Magno’s speech
Secretary, sir, good morning, sir. Chairman Shukuri, and Executive Director
Okuda, good morning. Thank you for inviting us over. I also want to acknowledge
our fellow civil servants, especially undersecretary TJ Batan and undersecretary
Lontoc, ma’am, good morning. Distinguished guests, observant from industries,
industry practitioners, members from academia, and everybody who spare thetime and attended this seminar.
My remarks are actually involving on, would give you, a view on how do wedeal with projects, as a project director and a program manager of the Metro
Manila Subway. Secretary reserved Metro Manila Subway for me. And what hehas mentioned during his speech, the North-South Commuter Railway. We would
like to give you a view of what we think and what we do, and that is our purpose
and that is how we would start the discussion on the railways. Let me just suggest
this really quick.
One, national growth in Asian building always starts with national policies. We
will not just do everything because it feels right, no. We will implement thisbecause of the national policies and that is, the Department of Transportation
especially the Philippines National Railways have to embrace those nationalpolicies with the correct time, efforts and resources. And the transport sector,incumbent upon us, to translate these national policies and implement it, using astrategy. Now, let me just remind what is our national policies. Just to be clear
which everyone is on the same page. Our national policy is set by NEDA (TheNational Economic and Development Authority). It is actually pretty simple. It
requires secure, reliable, efficient, integrated, inter-modal, affordable,cost-effective, environmentally sustainable, and people-oriented nationaltransportation system, that ensures improved quality of life to our people. That isour policy.
The nucleus of Philippines National Railway and railway transport strategy, isactually pretty simple. It is to expand the economic activities of Metro Manila andtransform that into Greater Capital Region (GCR) so we could achieve the GDPthat we are aspired. As dictated by our national policy, it can be 7%, it can be 8%.
It doesn’t matter, our job is to provide that landscape to grow the economy. To that,
Metro Manila, to GCR, it is challenge, because it is 4-5 times bigger than what
Metro Manila is.
Now, compound that with the aspiration of our citizens and our fellow
countrymen. According to a NEDA survey, 73% of Filipinos, they just want toearn enough to keep their family healthy, feed them, send his kids to school, andlet his kids finish college, that is the 73% of our countrymen. 61% wants to own amedium-size affordable houses, with reasonable distance from his place of workand earn enough for their daily needs, and insulate them from small and hugeeconomic upheaval. The other one is 30%, this is the key critical one. 30% of ourfellowmen, in the Philippines, wants to spend their extra time with family andfriends. I mean they want extra time to be with their family, not just working andcommuting. And 21% wants to travel outside the national border, and feels thefruit of their personal prosperity. I think those are very simple aspiration andpretty modest. However, it can be observed that the aspiration of our people ispretty simple, however they have one implicit component inside that aspiration,
have a house, spend time with family, send their kid to education, implicit to thatis actually transportation. So those are aspirations for them to tame quality of lifeand comfortable life. Transportation is the key implicit part for what they want toachieve aspiration.
So, when we came into power, however, we will be honest, we can barely
provide something satisfactory to our citizens, in terms of transport quality. As thematter of fact, our citizens mire transportation related burdens. For example, thepast 4-5 years, before we came into power, Filipinos are spending 5 hours per day
commuting between their place of occupation and where they live. In the lower
income strata, they even spend more than 6.5 hours a day, from where they live totheir office, and then back to where they live. So if you calculate that, it is 18% of
his life spend in his motor transportation. Just imagine that if you remove thesleep time, in this waking moment, that is 27% of the waking moment of theaverage Filipino spend inside transportation system. And his waking moment ismire with difficulties. He will be inside slow jeepney, or inside the bus, with thelong trip because the traffic. They will have multiple transfers and no guarantee ofprompt connection between modes of their transports. So that is the challenges

what our citizens is on. So these challenges, and our aspirations, if they mix
together, us, government, we cannot provide those aspirations unless we resolve
the transport issues that we face.
With that, let me borrow the quote from our secretary. The centerpiece of ourstrategy, it is not only to satisfy the national transport policy, it also has to satisfy
the primary attributes of personal aspiration of our citizens. With that, we use thestrategy what we call the comfortable life strategy. This is what the president
communicated, directed, to the secretary, and that is what we implement.
Comfortable life strategy is really simple. It has several attribute. One, if wedecide on something within our projects, we give back precious time to ourcitizens. We want to lower the commute time from 6 hours to 2.5 hours. That is ahuge 60% removal of the wait time and transport time, and that is our objective.
We want to give the best possible comfortable commuting, and provide optimalmeans and options of transport. That means also mass transport system. We want
to reduce the wait time and delays, and remove, this is very important,
improperbility in the system. With that, if we satisfy those attributes, then wecomply with the secretary’s comfortable life strategy.
Aside from that, complementary to the comfortable life strategy, we also, havebeen directed, to have a fast and ensure strategy, the secretary mentioned earlier. It
mandates that the project should have a commitment to deliver the comfortable
life in the shortest amount of time. Not just to deliver in the shortest amount oftime, but comfortable of life and shortest amount of time. So what are the attributeof those strategies. One, our project has to be viable, to be fast. To be viable, it has
to be fast and ensure. If it is not fast and ensure, it is not even viable. We have toimplement it and put attributes in our execution of the project that has to be fastand ensure before it is even viable for us. Second, it leverages the best practices,to deliver the project in the timely and orderly manner. We do not want to reinvent
everything. We want to know the best practices in the industries and from Japan,
and we wish to embrace them. So it would allow us to be much more successful.
Again, as mentioned by the secretary, the work should be in parallel and it should
be in 24 by 7. Project should have partial operability. If it is not partially operable,
then it does not comply with the fast and ensure strategy. Other thing that is notinherent in past project are this last two things, the fast and ensure strategy. The
government apparatus, is align with our goal meanings. NHA (National HousingAuthority) and several other agencies, DPWH (Department of Public Works andHighways), they have individual projects as DOTr. But as much as possible, thesecretary, told us, “No, work with them. Align them together to our projects. Meetthem as much as possible, and align their budgets, align their tasks, align theirobjectives with ours. So we have one common project.” So that is why “Build
Build Build” is not just a project goal. It is actually the method of coordination
among agencies, to implement these projects. And very important of all, this key
component that was introduced by the secretary, we get a direct executive
attention from the executive branch, from the cabinet. If we encounter an obstacle,
especially in the bureaucracy, our project so far, have been really successful,
because most of the time the secretary would allow us to call for executive
intervention which requires the direct intervention of the secretary and the cabinet
members.
Lastly, to further test the viability of our projects, and complementary to thepreviously mentioned strategies, we have, what we call a temporal objective
strategy. Our projects are usually, is determined based on the locations, space andother dimension. But as country mature, as we see in Japan, time, or the temporal
domain, is actually more valuable to the citizens and the passengers than moneyor infrastructure project itself. So now we include the temporal domain in theprocess of validation and determination of viability of projects. We took uponourselves, to put the temporal objective, let me explain what is the temporalobjective. Temporal objective is really simple, in our language, is simply, what wecall door-to-door objective, from your home to your place of work, and vice versa.
We exact upon ourselves, that at least, if we validate it, it will be 55 minutes awayfrom where you step out and you step in. If our objective is 2.5 hours, at least you
have 30 minutes to walk and take another mode of transport. But the key masstransport system should deliver our passenger within 55 minutes. Now, if alocation is within 55-minute boundary, then we consider that as a traffic center ofgravity. What do we mean traffic center of gravity? It is where people starts tocompromise their temporal objective. That means people would start to talk andmeet with their family and everything. Within the temporal strategy of 55 minutes,
this is the direction where we put our candidate for transit-oriented development
and that would be a candidate for land value capture. That is why I mentioned ourtemporal objective.

This is our guideline in implementing all these projects. This is delicate to us,
the strategy how we implement the projects. Let us give the secretary a big handfor giving us these objectives, please. [Applause] Thank you, sir. Again, this iswhat we use to implement the NSCR (North-South Commuter Railway) and theMetro Manila Subway or Mega Manila Subway project. So with that, ladies andgentlemen, thank you for inviting us. And we wish that the discussion today befruitful and productive to all stakeholder in the railway industry.
Thank you very much and good morning.