THE Department of Transportation and Communication plans to construct a multibillion-peso roll-on roll-off project that would link Manila and Mindanao in a bid to reduce travel time.

Documents from DOTC showed the government plans to construct a P49.3 billion Central RORO Spine.

The project involves the operation of an integrated transportation system combining RORO ferry port network and services with new toll roads linking Manila-Panay-Negros-Cebu-Bohol-Northern Mindanao.

The new RORO project is expected to reduce travel time from nine hours to five hours for Luzon to Caticlan; 10 hours to four hours, Luzon to Roxas; and 21 hours to 10 hours, Manila to Cebu. The DOTC also plans to rehabilitate the Davao Sasa Port to accomodate more passengers and cargo.

The P5 billion rehabilitation of the Sasa Port will expand cargo capacity to one million twenty-foot equivalent units per year from the current 700,000 TEUs.

The agency also will develop a new containter and multipurpose terminal at Consolaction/Mactan North in Cebu; a project that is estimated to cost P10.2 billion.

DOTC said these three projects would be funded through a combination of official development assistance and public-private partnership.

In a separate statement, the DOTC said it is studying the possibility of constructing bigger ports in Mindanao to bring down shipping costs, while helping boost agricultural production, beef up opportunities for building bulk handling facilities, and create more farm jobs.

DOTC Secretary Manuel Roxas said the government is partial to bigger ports in farm centrals rather than small ports in each of the country’s islands. This will be aligned with other economic and infrastructure plans such as the building of bulk handling facilities—for efficient transport

and storage of agricultural goods— and of major highways by the Department of Public Works and Highways.

“For Mindanao, we can concentrate on a few enlarged ports, and transform them into bulk handling ports. We are working very closely with DPWH so that the ports that we’ll enlarge will then benefit from the construction of wider roads,” Roxas said. He said the lack of economies of scale is why it is more expensive to ship goods from Mindanao to Manila than from California to Manila, citing the country’s more than 100 small, non-useful ports.

“Everyone wants to have a port. Historically, over the last seven decades, requests for these ports had been granted. You have zero economies of scale. There are no large ports and silos, and container yards,” the DOTC chief said.

“Even the largest ones—Davao, Cagayan de Oro, Phividec—are small relative to what could have been. So if you have small ports, you have small cargoes, therefore you have small ships, hence an inefficient transport system,” he added.