MRT-3: The daily commute is the destination

The first time I took the MRT, I had this feeling I wasn’t in the danged P.I. All that gleaming metal, newly manufactured rubber, squeaky escalators… It was like putting a new car to a test drive - it's a novelty that would stay with me for a very long time. I felt like the robot character in the movie Short Circuit where, the moment he's trundled out of the lab and into the great wide open, he is overwhelmed by what he sees that all he could say is an ecstatic, “Input!,” “Input!,” as his digital eyes record everything in sight.

I would seldom take the MRT after that. There was no need to, except when I had to be in Cubao from Ayala in split seconds. It was years later, when I would leave my job in the comfort zone of Makati and find a new one in faraway Q.C. that I became an MRT regular. Becoming a regular would eventually mean becoming what you might call an MRT addict. That meant taking the train twice a day. That meant regarding the MRT experience in a whole new way.

The two-way ride, needless to say, soon ceased to be a novelty. It turned into something familiar which, as familiarity goes, I anticipated to view with contempt. Yet, strangely, so far, after about two months’ commute, I couldn’t bring myself to being my old contemptuous self. For a born pessimist, that’s a lot. My five-day-a-week MRT commute would prove to be something I am grateful of as a much-needed improvement, a breath of fresh air, in my Third World existence as a commuter.

Day to day, I step into coach after coach with this cocktail of oft-clashing, sometimes-cryptic feelings. But whichever the case, the result is always something delicate. First, there’s the nostalgia I associate with the whole thing. I happen to have personally known this PR guy assigned to handle the public affairs side of this monstrous to-do that was this behemoth’s construction at the time. I remember how all of us who used EDSA went through months, even years, of hell for it that, we thought, “It better be damn serviceable, or else, there'd be hell to pay…”

Thank goodness there soon arose in this corner of EDSA (Pasay Rd./Aranaiz Ave.) this giant billboard to allay our inner suicide bomber. “Cubao to Makati in 15 minutes!” said the poster, my friend the PR guy’s brainchild, no doubt. It employed a generic-looking, street-smart construction guy as an MRT poster boy. This, in between the neon lights at night blinking, “Safety First!,” if not “Please bear with us” or “Your taxes are working for you.” I'm not sure which part worked, but the PR gimmick would in no time receive recognition in an international PR awards ceremony in Finland a year or so after.

Far from inspiring contempt, this giant caterpillar ride soon made me regard it with fondness, the way I would have for an extended ride in the roller caosters at Enchanted Kingdom (our local version of Disneyland, in Sta. Rosa, Laguna). I thought they might as well install a 360-degree loop in the middle of Magallanes, overlooking the Skyway on the SLEX or in Cubao where the MRT intersects LRT2. To complete the circus feel, they could add a series of horror trains perhaps at the Buendia and Ayala stations, which are actually tunnels or practically the closest we could ever get to a subway. For someone given to thinking exquisitely pompous thoughts and spectacularly implausible scenarios at lucid intervals, the MRT ride is such a welcome opportunity.

It’s also something that offers a little complexity to my embarrassingly simple, regular life, even as I am transported with ease from point A to point B. I could be catching myself between paraphrasing Pico Iyer thoughts (“To travel is to taste hardship.”) and faintly anticipating someone in the crowd yelling “Emergency!” Or I could be testing the effect of viewing the entire length of EDSA with this and that techno or punk rock accompaniment, as played in my brother’s iPod. As I meditate deep stuff, I am forced to multi-task: Often, it's all about getting myself stuck between not just two interesting people but also equally exquisite dilemmas. For example: (a) getting irked by a seatmate who coughs nonstop and smells of freshly pounded garlic and (b) repositioning my eye sockets to avoid staring directly at the vicinity of people’s knees. The thing is, there is great unpredictability amid all that regularity, and this is what probably keeps the MRT ride from ever becoming boring, at least for me.

Soon enough, as the train moves you along its track with First-World regularity, you will be forced to notice a lot of other things outside the window, too, that you had taken for granted before. Oftentimes you find yourself both being literally and figuratively taken for an MRT ride. You notice that those hotels painted in Day-Glo colors are the gaudiest buildings in the Metro, and also its ugliest. You also notice those chintzy, glinting tiled roofs of Corinthian Garden and Blue Ridge mansions, and wonder whether everybody, each and every Filipino, would ever afford to have one such in their lifetime. You notice how, with Imee Marcos’ smirk (or is that a pout? or is that a British stiff upper lip?), Borgy Manotoc’s giant mug in a Swatch billboard on the Robinson’s Galleria mall’s façade is staring down at the brass statue of Our Lady of EDSA with impunity.

If weirder thoughts assault you without any warning, it’s because you can afford all that luxury. One time, from out of the blue, it occurs to me that the solution to the constant traffic in EDSA is a very simple one: Let those who go to Makati and Pasay for their jobs swap houses and apartments with those coming from Quezon City and its environs. Makes a lot of sense to me.

An MRT ride also means disorientation in minutes, which closely resembles the effect one feels traveling by plane. Working in Quezon City these days is a culture shock for someone who has worked in Makati all his life. Q.C., though home of the biggest TV media players ABS-CBN and GMA7, seems to be more of an NGO and bureaucrat haven to me, so far removed from the glass-tower realities I’ve known and gotten used to. Now, I’m no longer certain which of the two nerve centers of the metro has more…er, character.

It’s a difference in the look-and-feel that I didn’t notice much before, which I notice now because I perceive what's supposed to be a subtle change in just a matter of minutes instead of the usual time gap you get (hours and hours!) by traveling by car or bus. That familiar time gap is suddenly bridged by the efficacious speed of the trains. You discern something that’s indefinably lost behind all that efficiency.

Before the MRT, it took an entire desert caravan-paced expedition for one to reach Novaliches from Taft Ave., Pasay City. The hours-long time lag that mentally and physically prepares the traveler that he/she is going to another, different place is lost, together with the psychological presumption that one is traveling from one place that’s very familiar and contemptible to another that’s far and a bit strange and perhaps much more inviting.

An MRT ride engenders that unique vision of this slice of city life, something which cannot be replicated by any other experience, I’m afraid, unless perhaps they build new lines like this. (Phase 2 will reportedly extend this line to Monumento, in Caloocan.) I wonder what happens if everything moved this fast; will all the necessary changes soon follow and make the whole megalopolis melt in a bland uniformity?

As a lot of people know, the Metro Rail Transit was built by a consortium under a build-operate-transfer scheme during President Fidel V. Ramos’s administration to the tune of $655-million. MRTC is led by Fil-Estate and composed of Ayala Land Inc., Anglo-Philippine Holdings, Ramcar Greenfield Development, Allante Realty and DBH Inc. The MRT-3 Blue Line, also known as Metrostar Express, spans 6.4 km. of EDSA, punctuated at irregular intervals by 13 stations that offer vantage points that vary, not the least in height and the views available. There’s the treetop-level (Annapolis-Santolan), the street-level (Pasay-Taft), the subterranean (Ayala Ave.), the mangy and grungy (Cubao), the billboard-choked (Guadalupe). It was reported that the roughly 30-minute ride has a present "ridership" of about 400,000 per day.

At this point, it might be interesting to compare and contrast the MRT with the LRT if only to further point out something I missed so far: While LRT1 cuts right through the middle of all that Old World civilization, with its horrors of postcolonial decay and patches of hopeful rebirth and awful remodeling, MRT gives a more comprehensive picture of, say, the New World, albeit in a little more distant, a little less in-your-face manner. Cruising the city on the more intimate level of the LRT ride, you get to meet the earthiest urban characters at odd hours, intimate enough for you to exchange your face with somebody else, like this ambulant vendor I had met who had this intrusive prerecorded sales pitch that played, “Mura lang, mura lang, piso isa, piso isa…,” the tape being in an unending repeat mode. That sort of visceral thing. I once gave a man-on-the-street LRT tour guide to a visitor from California a cousin asked me to show around, and his reaction was all of a nervous, wide-eyed, and diplomatic “It’s pretty packed!”

You won’t hear that kind of social commentary with MRT travel, even when the rush-hour traffic slams you with a tsunami of warm bodies getting ready for coffee and perhaps a nasty inter-office memo. At the maximum cost of P14 (one-way), you get an entire panorama of a grimy, topsy-turvy, unplaceable, fairly cosmopolitan metropolis, one that’s strangely capable of summoning the entire gamut of emotions from you.

This relatively new slithering landmark of the city does all these things I just told you about -- and perhaps more. Well, for instance, it also makes you assess -- from some sort of a rarefied vantage point -- how life in the P.I. is, after those four fateful days of February 1986 that stunned the whole world, the longest days this country ever had.

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Sidebar: Some tips to maximize the benefits of your MRT trip:

1. Don’t wear a miniskirt. If you’re a guy, always be sure you didn’t leave your fly open.

2. For the best deal, buy the P100 ‘stored-value’ card. It saves time, and you get to avail of bonus rides.

3. Bring no bags or anything that could invite suspicion.

4. Never take a seat if you are given to being attacked by pangs of guilt.

5. Avoid the rush hours: 8-9AM and 6-7 PM and these chokepoints as point of entry: Guadalupe, Cubao, Pasay Rotunda and North Ave. stations.

6. Avoid the doors at all costs to avoid the onrush and in case of stampede.

7. But if you ‘travel’ for the pain and inconvenience, go park yourself right at the door.

8. If you must take a seat, be sure not to sit next to someone who had just eaten fresh garlic and who could have a bird flu.

9. There are a variety of food stalls, phone card stalls, etc., just in case the need arises.

10. The MRT is not the best place to catch sleep. Read instead. Bring a pocketbook If you want, there’s a copy of Libre, the free tabloid, or its equivalents, at every station.

11. In the event of a coach conking out on you, there’s always the next form of hardship on hand: the bus.