Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida visited the Metro Manila Subway Project at the Valenzuela depot on Saturday, November 4.
In a live video posted by the Department of Transportation (DOTr), the Prime Minister was accompanied by Transportation Secretary Jaime J. Bautista and Undersecretary Cesar Chavez.
Kishida, who hails from a country with 150 years of experience in rail development and 30,000 kilometers of rail, has been supporting the Philippines’ ambitious rail expansion.
The current subway project, dubbed "Project of the Century," has two huge tunnel boring machines digging hundreds of meters of tunnel.
Through the 33-km subway project with 17 stations from Valenzuela City to Ninoy Aquino International Airport Terminal 3, travel time is expected to reduce.
DOTr said that travel time ranges from 1 hour and 30 minutes to 35 minutes.
In a separate statement on Thursday, Secretary Bautista acknowledged the Prime Minister for helping the country with its transportation challenges.
“The Philippine railway sector has been a recipient of billions of pesos in Japanese aid. PM Kishida, long before he was Prime Minister, has been instrumental in funneling Japanese assistance to the country’s ambitious rail expansion,” Bautista said.
According to Bautista, Prime Minister Kishida "was already a backer of our country’s drive to modernize our transportation system" when he was still Japan’s Foreign Affairs Minister in 2017.
Through the JPY 1.315 trillion worth of Japanese aid, about nine Philippine big-ticket transport projects—two aviation, two maritime, and five railways—are being built or will be delivered.
