It seems that the issue regarding the common station for Line 1, Line 3 and the future Line 7 in the North EDSA area has not yet been resolved. The interested private sector parties, Ayala and SM, will not back down on their arguments support each’s proposal for the common station to be located at either of the giant malls that each corporation owns. Ayala’s claim is that the contract for the Line Extension to Cavite stipulates that the common station with Line 3 should be at Trinoma. Meanwhile, SM is claiming the validity of an agreement it made with DOTC on a grand central station to be located across their SM City North EDSA mall. The last one is consistent with an even earlier agreement with the proponents of the future Line 7 for an end station in front of SM.

A compromise solution to the impasse should be in the works and is the responsibility of the DOTC. What if instead of one common station, two stations are made into common ones? There will be no grand central station in the sense that all three lines will terminate as presented in SM’s version nor will there be a common station for Lines 1 and 3 at Trinoma that incorporates a very long walkway to a Line 7 station near Mindanao Avenue. Instead there can be two common stations – one at SM North for Line 1 and Line 7, and another at Trinoma for Line 1 and Line 3. Line 1 will still terminate at Trinoma but can have another stop at SM North where there can be a smooth transfer between Line 1 and Line 7, which terminates at this station. Perhaps there should still be a walkway connecting the two common stations in the interest of pedestrians although seamless fare collection systems and platform design can easily allow Line 7 or Line 3 passengers to ride Line 1 trains between stations to transfer to Line 3 or Line 7.

The common station or stations (depending on what will finally come out of this) should be designed thinking of the best interests of the public who will be using the transit systems and stations. Lost in the discussions are the plight of commuters. Parties claim that their designs are in the best interest of commuters (actually SM has the better set-up of all three lines terminating at one central station) and yet the bottomline for their arguments are very much revenue oriented – not for the transit lines but for their own commercial developments. Its basically one mall vs. another, leaving out the public as incidentals in the discussions. This is why government must intervene and this is where DOTC should show it has a spine after all and is promoting the public good and not favoring one private company over another. And so we’ll wait and see what will eventually come out of this although a lot of people continue to suffer with their inefficient commutes and are definitely becoming more impatient about mass transit systems that should have been constructed a long time ago.

–