The Cebu City Traffic Management Coordination Committee Board on Wednesday has expressed its doubts on the efficiency of the P500 million newly-installed “most advanced traffic system” in the city.
In an interview with Daily Tribune, Traffic Board chairman Atty. Rico Rey Francis Holganza clarified that the doubts come as neither the board nor the City Transportation Office has “authorized anybody to speak for and on behalf of the office endorsing the claimed benefits of this traffic light project.”
The CCTMC stressed that since last year, there were already malfunctioning traffic lights even at major intersections involving these newly installed traffic lights.
“The past few days, the contractor/supplier of the new phase digitalized traffic light system project has been promoting their product as one using the most advanced traffic system in the world,” the board added.
“While we respect the contractor/supplier’s way of promoting their product in such a very grandiose and highly eyebrow- raising way, we in the Cebu City Traffic Management Coordination Committee would want to approach this claim/publicity with much caution and circumspection,” it added.
The contractor and supplier of the project are Cylix Technologies Inc. and Triune Electronic Systems Inc. — both are Luzon-based as per their Facebook pages and were awarded the P500 million contract to develop a digital system for traffic including vehicle detection, license plate recognition, speed cameras, digital countdown timers, and modern traffic signal controllers.
Daily Tribune is still waiting for their response.
“We hope that the traffic system that this project is supposedly providing, if any, will actually result in a smoother flow of traffic in our city and that Cebu City will not simply end up with an inventory of a mere bunch of monitors and CCTV’s being passed off as a ‘traffic system,’” Holganza said.
He also disclosed that an executive of Triune admitted to the Board that he was misquoted in the news article that came out as “the traffic system they’re installing as the most advanced in the world.”