From increasing the number of trains and trips to reducing waiting time on the platform, private rail operator Light Rail Manila Corporation (LRMC) continues with its improvements on LRT-1, even harnessing Filipino talents for more solutions towards a “biyaheng better everyday”.
In partnership with the De La Salle-College of St. Benilde Hub for Innovation For Inclusion (DLS-CSB HIFI), LRMC today launched Hackatren, which aims to crowdsource for IT applications that will help in further improving customer experience on LRT-1.
“LRMC believes in the Filipino talent,” LRMC President and CEO Juan Alfonso said. “With Hackatren, we will showcase the IT programming skills of Filipinos. It will also be a platform for them to contribute to the uplift of customer experience at LRT-1.”
Hackatren is open to all Filipinos who are 18 years old and above, with a knack for programming, designing, and coding. Interested applicants must form a team of three to four members, of which one is the designer or architect, and the rest are coders.
Registration is open from June 11 to June 30, 2018. Shortlisted applicants will be invited to the Hackatren pre-hack day on June 30, where IT experts and mentors from LRMC will orient the participants in preparation for the main Hackatren event. Qualified teams will move on to the Hackatren event on July 14-15, 2018.
LRMC is a joint venture company of Metro Pacific Investments Corporation’s Metro Pacific Light Rail Corporation (MPLRC), Ayala Corporation’s AC Infrastructure Holdings Corporation (AC Infra), and the Philippine Investment Alliance for Infrastructure’s Macquarie Infrastructure Holdings (Philippines) PTE Ltd. (MIHPL). It assumed operations and maintenance of LRT-1 in September 2015 through a 32-year concession agreement with the Department of Transportation and the Light Rail Transit Authority (LRTA).
Since 2015, LRMC has spent P8 billion to date in accelerating improvements on Southeast Asia’s oldest railway system. The projects include the replacement of the 26-kilometer rails and parapets, the light rail vehicle (LRV) rehabilitation program and station improvement. It has also introduced and developed IT solutions that streamlined business processes which contributed to increased average daily trips by 9.7% from 505 trips in 2016 to 554 trips in 2017, and zero failure notice on train availability, punctuality and reliability in the first quarter of 2018.
