In 1989, Filipino inventor and investment banker Francis Yuseco Jr. conceptualized, designed and copyrighted the Philippine Track Rapid Transit (PRT) system to mass-transport, not only passengers, but also agriculture products, fish and cargo.
The locally made transit system was meant to liberate the country from the clutches of its dependence on foreign loans and technology.
Yuseco proposed to install the PRT along the wide and unoccupied middle islands of Edsa based on the results of an exhaustive study conducted by the University of the Philippines Transport Training Center (UPTTC, now the National Center for Transport Studies).
The study concluded that instead of the then proposed Edsa MRT plus the 6,000 buses plying Edsa, a
Philtrak consortium could reduce the buses to only 92 units,
each one traveling at an average speed of 48 kilometers per hour, with headways of 15 seconds and dwell times of 20 seconds.
A
headway is a measurement of the minimum possible distance or time between vehicles in a transit system.
Dwell time, meanwhile, refers to the time that a vehicle spends at a scheduled stop, either to load or unload passengers, or wait for traffic ahead to clear.
Dwell time is a common measure of efficiency in public transport, with shorter dwell times seen as being universally desirable.
Yuseco’s idea would have cost P2.2 billion today. In contrast, the government-approved Edsa BRT for the same distance would cost P14.4 billion.