The construction of the railway Common Station project will finally start this year and is expected to be completed by early 2020 after almost a decade of legal entanglements.
The Philippine Department of Transportation (DOTr) on September 29 led groundbreaking rites for the project to signal the start of construction. The station will cover approximately 13,700 square meters of concourse area that will rise between the malls SM City North EDSA and TriNoma in Quezon City.
The project has been put on hold for almost a decade due to legal dispute. In September last year, DOTr and the companies involved in the legal battle agreed to settle the case and chose to place the common station in between the two malls. This paved the way for the signing last January 18 of the memorandum of understanding to build the common station that will link the Light Rail Transit (LRT) Line 1, Metro Rail Transit (MRT) 3, the under construction MRT 7, and the recently approved Metro Manila Subway.
“We celebrate as we ground-break, but groundbreaking is one thing, finishing the project is another,” DOTr Secretary Arthur Tugade said during the groundbreaking ceremony.
DOTr said part of the P2.8 billion in project cost will go into building a more spacious concourse area, the bigger space needed due to the expected large increase in ridership traffic that will result from the extension of LRT 1 to Cavite, the completion of MRT 7 starting from San Jose Del Monte, Bulacan, and the connection to the Metro Manila Subway. The common station is expected to serve some 478,000 rail passengers daily by 2020.
The project will also deliver a dual-track system for all of LRT 1, MRT 3, and MRT 7 for increased operational efficiency.
Consistent with DOTr’s focus on multimodal interoperability, the ground level of the Common Station will service road-based public utility vehicles. This will allow not only seamless railway-to-railway transfers, but also seamless railway-to-bus-to-jeep transfers. DOTr added that congestion in EDSA will be reduced since loading and unloading will no longer be on the curbside.
