It seems MRT-3 stations are becoming potential death traps as dangerous crowd control practices are now being used to “manage” the increasing volumes of passengers using the line. As seen in the following photo, passengers are made to queue on stairs leading to the train platforms packed like sardines.
The photo was posted by a certain Donna Miranda on the DOTC-MRT3 Facebook page…
As you can see commuters waiting to board the arriving train on EDSA-Taft Station have barely any space to breathe or move while the platform remains wide open. As your passenger, as someone patronising your services for the last 12 years I think I deserve to be heard if not acknowledge or at the minimum be treated with the right kind of respect any customer deserves. As I have pointed out in my previous post that you had taken down, this is unsafe. Consider the possibility of any of these commuters having heart attack, hypertension, or simply being squished by raging crowd, how shall we attend to them when there is barely any space to move. Also consider the possibility of children being squished and pregnant women who may go into premature labor because of all the pushing.
Another photo, exhibited on Miranda’s profile provides a clearer picture of how passengers are restrained from making their way onto the platforms before the trains arrive.
Miranda later posts another photo on her personal profile showing further passenger grief as the “social experiment”, this time at Ayala Station, progresses.
As expected, today has gotten far worse. The cordoned area are for where male passengers need to ‘line up’ that is squeeze themselves into. Meanwhile women passengers are allowed to pass thru the ropes only to be greeted by another round of bottleneck congestion (as in the photo from the other day). 3rd day of MRT3 new social experiment. Also the train we rode around 6:30pm was defective so we were offloaded to join the other crowd of already frustrated commuters at Ayala Station.
The Manila Metro Rail Transit System Line 3 (MRT-3) is Metro Manila’s third rapid transit line. It forms part of the regional passenger rail system, which includes the Manila Light Rail Transit System Line 1, Manila Light Rail Transit System Line 2 and the Philippine National Railways commuter line. The line operates under the name Metrostar Express, and is colored blue (old) and yellow (new) on rail maps. The line is located along the Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA), one of Metro Manila’s main thoroughfares. It has thirteen stations along its 16.95 km track which passes through the cities of Makati, Mandaluyong, Pasay and Quezon City. While originally intended to decongest EDSA, the MRT-3 has been only partially successful in decongesting EDSA, and congestion is further aggravated by the rising number of motor vehicles. The expansion of the system to cover the entire stretch of EDSA is expected to contribute to current attempts to decongest the thoroughfare and to cut travel times.
Opened in 1999, the MRT-3 is operated by the Metro Rail Transit Corporation (MRTC), a private company operating in partnership with the Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTC) under a Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) agreement. Although it has characteristics of light rail, such as the type of rolling stock used, it is more akin to a rapid transit system.
[NB: Parts of this article were lifted off Wikipedia.org and used in accordance with that site's Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License consistent with the same license applied by Get Real Post to its content. Facebook pages and profiles from which photos in this article were sourced were publicly accessible at the time of their publication here.]
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