Inflation? Not to worry
BY AMADO MACASAET
MMDA, WB ink RFID project
The Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA) and World Bank (WB) has inked an Emissions Reduction Purchase Agreement (ERPA) to help reduce traffic congestion in EDSA, reduce green house gas (GHG) emissions and curb air pollution in one of the country’s busiest roads.
The ERPA, known as EDSA Bus Reduction Project, provides WB, on behalf of the Carbon Fund for Europe, to purchase from MMDA the GHG emission reductions in the area in 2011 to 2013 worth €364,000 or more than P24 million, WB said.
It ha s a fixed 10-year crediting period under the Clean Development Mechanism, an instrument under the Kyoto Protocol of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, promoting projects reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
The project aims in optimizing bus traffic along EDSA by enhancing the existing organized bus route system of MMDA with electronic Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology "to better manage the dispatch of bus units at terminals, limit dwell times at bus stops, enforce franchise and traffic rules, and ban arbitrary trip-cutting and out-of-line operations," the Washington-based lender said.
"The database to be accumulated by the system will also provide a platform for better urban transport planning and for the development of an effective public transport franchise management, which can be replicated in other urban centers in the country," MMDA chairman Oscar Inocentes said.
"Under the project, each registered bus will be fitted with an electronic tag that will have a unique identifier code, which is associated in the computer database with the identification records of the bus unit to which the tag is attached. When RFID-tagged buses enter terminals, principal stops, and a number of other locations where tag readers are installed, they will be detected, including off-route running buses. The information is sent by the readers to the central server with software applications that interpret the data and support the headway management, dispatching, dwell-time management, violation-detection, and violation-reporting functions, which are all expected to help eliminate illegal operators and buses," WB said.
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