"Protect the Pasig River! Oppose Ramon Ang's
Pasig River Expressway (PAREx) Project!"
This note is in one with the concerned folk in strongly opposing Ramon Ang-San Miguel Corporation’s Pasig River Expressway (PAREx) Project. This ambitious project, composed of a bridgeway that will straddle the length of the Pasig River is the latest corporate-driven megaproject that poses a threat to Manila’s environment and cityscape.
According to the Department of Public Works and Highways’ website, this profit-driven project, touted as a solution to Metro Manila's traffic and logistics woes, will have three major segments: Segment 1 from R-10 to Skyway 3 Plaza Azul, Manila; Segment 2 from Skyway 3 San Juan River to C-5, and Segment 3 from C-5 to C-6. PAREx will also connect to, and utilize a 2.7-km portion of the new Skyway Stage 3 from Nagtahan to Plaza Azul.
And along with other existing megaprojects brought by Ramon Ang will further reinforce the rising dominance of this big compradore bourgeois in large public infrastructure projects which promises San Miguel Corporation hundreds of billions of pesos in profit. Prior to PAREx, Ramon Ang has successfully cornered giant public infrastructure projects that promises a return of hundreds of billions of pesos in profit. He was granted government license to start the Aerotropolis Project to build and operate a new airport in Bulacan. Ang also owns and operates the NAIA Expressway, the Skyway Stage 3 and the Tarlac-Pangasinan-La Union Expressway.
However, this Malacañang-promoted ₱97-billion megaproject, as any other infrastructural feat being touted under the “Build Build Build” program will instead be treated as a pallative solution, to which critics have pointed out how this project will induce the use of more vehicles and exacerbate the perennial traffic in Metro Manila. Furthermore, this also transforms the city’s iconic river and main waterway into a dark underworld above which will loom yet another hellish landscape of asphalt and concrete.
Expect apologists would still praise this project as a necessary solution to traffic and logistics woes amidst popular criticism. But many fear that this Project will also damage heritage sites and structures especially in Manila, and further pollute the Pasig River. And contrary to the statements brought by San Miguel, the project is also being criticized for the absence of transparency with the lack of studies to evaluate its impact on the public and the environment. Even Palafox and associates, whom San Miguel allegedly consulted for the project, expressed hesitantly about the environmental implications of the said expressway nor denies working with San Miguel for the proposed project.
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While this note supports initiatives based on sound science regarding the maintenance and cleanliness of the Pasig River, the fact that the current dredging operations such as those planned by the San Miguel Corporation, as rather just preppin stages for various concrete monstrosities “in the name of development”. This pretentious venture, initially using "environment" with its dredging programs over Pasig and other rivers like Tullahan, turns out an attempt to set foundations for the proposed megaprojects that rather aggravates problems ranging from noise pollution to that of “non-exhaust emissions” like microplastics from car tires, road dust, and particulate matter. Just find how absurd Ramon Ang justifying the project "can solve traffic and congestion, provide jobs for thousands of Filipinos, boost productivity, improve people’s daily commutes, address flooding, and save the Pasig River itself"- these that can also be resolved by improving the existing mass transport system. For sure one would wonder that the government who accepted this billion-peso road project also building modern train lines and even a subway, and this is what we must focus on instead, not highways! Trains, when reliable and connected to other networks, can move more people than any car.
But anyway, under today's neoliberal policy, public conveniences such as roads and bridges, have increasingly lost their public service orientation as these are put under the control of profit-driven big capitalists such as Ramon Ang and other big compradore bourgeois. They are given control over large tracts of public lands and public space to generate profit in the form of pay-for-access expressways and bridges, while public roads are without space to expand and left to deteriorate. People are compelled to pay for the “conveniences” even as they continue to pay taxes to a state that has abandoned all responsibility to provide them with such.