THE Department of Transportation (DoTr) said it requested an additional P3 billion in funding to build an additional station in Bacoor City for the Light Rail Transit Line 1 (LRT-1) Cavite extension.
“We requested roughly around P3 billion for the 2026 GAA (General Appropriations Act) from the Department of Budget and Management. This (new station) was a request by Bacoor City,” Transportation Secretary Vivencio B. Dizon told reporters on Monday on the sidelines of the Economic Journalists Association of the Philippines (EJAP) Infrastructure forum.
Mr. Dizon said the proposal of Bacoor City to add a station in the barangay of Talaba will not change the proposed line’s current alignment.
“We wrote to Light Rail Manila Corp. (LRMC) because we need to harmonize this (proposal). I was told that it is easy to do this because it is within the alignment. The new station will be in the middle of Zapote and Niog,” Mr. Dizon said, referring to two other stops in Bacoor.
He said the DoTr does not yet have a ridership forecast for the station.
LRT-1 Cavite Extension phase 1, which has a total of five stations, opened last year.
The first phase added a total of 6.2 kilometers to the line, connecting Baclaran Station in Pasay City to Dr. Santos Station in Parañaque City. The segment with the mostly Cavite stations, or phases two and three, initially only covered Las Piñas, Zapote, and Niog stations.
The DoTr plans to bid out the construction of the Talaba station and then turn it over to LRMC, the operator of LRT-1.
“Since there is future development in Bacoor, then most likely, there is a potential huge ridership there,” Mr. Dizon said.
The DoTr said it is expecting to complete the final phase of the LRT-1 Cavite extension by 2030 at the latest.
LRMC is the joint venture of Ayala Corp., Metro Pacific Light Rail Corp., and Macquarie Infrastructure Holdings (Philippines) Pte. Ltd.
Metro Pacific Light Rail is a unit of Metro Pacific Investments Corp., which is one of three Philippine subsidiaries of Hong Kong’s First Pacific Co. Ltd., the others being PLDT Inc. and Philex Mining Corp.
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