THE Philippines has been living in a state of perpetual catch-up. For two decades, the country has chased transport systems it should have built years ago, watched neighbors surge ahead, and returned again and again to plans that never left the drawing board.
Twenty years ago, the country needed a subway. Twenty years later, it is finally building one-into a Metro Manila far more congested than when the capital region first required it.
The bus rapid transit (BRT) systems planned for major cities should have been carrying passengers a decade ago. Instead, Cebu’s BRT, launched in 2013 with a three-year timeline and a lower budget, remains unfinished.
Seaports and airports should have been modernized before demand overwhelmed them. The technical glitch that shut down Ninoy Aquino International Airport on New Year’s Day 2023, stranding nearly 60,000 passengers, exposed decades of neglect.
The modernization of public utility vehicles should have begun in 2015, when the Dream Plan first recommended it based on rigorous analysis. Nearly a decade later, the program remains botched and in limbo, while the country has lost an estimated 30 percent of its public transport capacity.
By the time these improvements arrive, the infrastructure might be obsolete.
The story of the past 20 years of Philippine transportation is not a lack of vision or expertise, but of its failure to execute.
Between 2005 and 2025, the Philippines developed comprehensive master plans-often in partnership with Japanese government funding and grounded in traffic data and systems analysis-for railways, bus corridors, integrated ticketing, and pedestrian infrastructure.
Most of these plans had gathered dust in government offices while congestion deepened, public transport withered, and millions of commuters spent hours each day navigating a system that experts said has not merely stagnated but actively ‘regressed.’
In contrast, Vietnam built metro systems. Indonesia modernized its airports. Thailand expanded its railways. Cities across Southeast Asia that were once behind Manila in development now have transportation infrastructure that works.
Meanwhile, the gap between the Philippines and these countries widens every year.
Well-crafted plans, but . . .
‘We have decades-old transportation plans which are well-crafted and regularly updated,’ said Michael Sagcal, who served as spokesperson for the then Department of Transportation and Communications (DOTr) under the late President Benigno Aquino III. ‘The main problem has always been in implementation.’
According to government officials, transport economists, academics, and advocates, there is a pattern that has persisted across several presidential administrations: ambitious planning undermined by weak institutions, political discontinuity every six years, and investment priorities that consistently favor private vehicles over the commuting public.
Budgets are redrawn with each new administration. Officials are replaced. Projects that took years to plan become vulnerable to new political calculations. Plans give way to improvisation.
And the cost is measured not just in wasted time and money, but in daily experience. More Filipinos have been forced to buy cars or motorcycles out of necessity, worsening the very congestion that makes public transport unviable.
The country is caught in a spiral, building today what it needed decades ago, only to find that by the time projects are completed, they arrive already obsolete.
The question is whether the Philippines can build institutions strong enough to break this cycle-or whether the next 20 years will repeat the patterns of the last.
Master plans without masters
RENE Santiago, a transport economist, has watched this pattern repeat itself for nearly five decades. He worked on the country’s first comprehensive master plan in 1975 and on every major successor since.
His assessment is blunt: the trajectory has been ‘regressive.’
‘Before 2000, transport decisions were anchored on research and science,’ Santiago said in an interview. ‘But institutional memory eroded. Technocratic planning gave way to improvisation, driven by political cycles and a revolving door of well-meaning but underqualified personnel.’
The first master plan-the Metro Manila Transport, Land Use and Development Planning Project-envisioned Light Rail Transit (LRT) Line 1 and bus priority lanes.
Some recommendations were implemented, but most were not. Plans developed in the 1980s with Australian funding, in the 1990s with Japanese support, and again in 2015 followed the same pattern.
They were comprehensive, data-driven, and technically sound. And they were largely ignored as each new administration chose to start fresh rather than build on what came before.
Jose Regin Regidor, a research fellow at the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman National Center for Transportation Studies, said that while master plans exist on paper, what gets built are ‘select projects usually palatable to the administration at the time.’
Apparently, academic recommendations carried weight during President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s term, when UP was formally engaged for strategic planning.
That engagement has since diminished, replaced by what Santiago describes as administrations that ‘reinvent the wheel with technically under-equipped staff and ad hoc priorities.’
The Department of Transportation (DOTr) itself acknowledges these institutional weaknesses in written responses, citing ‘uncoordinated planning, overlapping functions and conflicting policies’ among agencies responsible for traffic management, transport, and land-use regulation.
The curse of the six-year reset
THE problem is not ignorance, but the lack of institutional structure to translate expertise and master plans into completed projects that weather political transitions.
Sagcal described the dynamic as a ‘perfect storm’ that arrives with each change in administration. New government priorities lead to restructured budgets. Personnel changes bring new officials who may lack the technical background of their predecessors.
‘The mistake that the country keeps repeating is deviating from well-formulated, well-thought-out plans-and this is done every six years, sometimes even less. The result is that we are perpetually playing catch-up: one step forward with new plans, two steps backwards with lost time. By the time a new project is implemented, its original intended effect would have been overtaken years before,’ he said.
Santiago agreed, citing, for instance, the case of Metro Manila and the National Capital Region.
‘Metro Manila is now beyond redemption without radical reform,’ Santiago said, citing a study that found the capital region far outside what researchers call the ‘Goldilocks zone’ for sustainable urban systems.
Its housing, jobs, transport, and services are already overwhelmed.
‘Catch-up is inconceivable under a dysfunctional governance regime,’ he said.
The monumental cost of delay
TODAY, commuters no longer measure progress based on new infrastructure developments such as rail lines or integrated transport systems.
They measure it in how much longer they wait for a ride.
Unfortunately, the numbers tell a story of steady decline. Traffic congestion has deepened across major cities. Travel times have lengthened. Worse, the public transport system that millions of commuters depend on has lost capacity even as demand for more vehicles has increased.
Robert Siy, the convener of the Move As One Coalition, estimates that the country has lost about 30 percent of its public transport capacity over the past decade.
The reasons are complex but interrelated. As congestion worsened, jeepneys and buses spent more time stuck in traffic, lessening the number of trips they could make each day. Fewer trips meant fewer passengers and less income. Many operators, facing financial losses, went out of business.
And without adequate public transport, more Filipinos turned to purchasing cars or motorcycles to beat the traffic.
This increased the number of vehicles on the roads, which worsened congestion and made public transport even less viable. Then the spiral continues.
‘The result is that we have become more dependent on private vehicle use,’ Siy said.
The recent pandemic also exposed just how fragile the system had become. When lockdowns forced public transport to shut down, the government struggled to respond.
Sadly, Siy said, it had not recognized public transport as an essential service requiring active management. It lacked tools to monitor supply or manage the crisis effectively. The result was chaos that persisted long after initial lockdowns ended.
‘We saw then how we could have rebooted transport, including rationalizing and modernizing public transport. However, we didn’t and opted to have the ‘old normal’ back,’ Regidor said. ‘So here we are, and we still have an inefficient transport system with mode shares slowly being eroded in favor of private transportation.’
For the country as a whole, traffic congestion acts as a brake on economic growth.
According to the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), Metro Manila loses P3.5 billion a day-or about P1.27 trillion due to traffic congestion.
By 2035, this is projected to rise to an estimated P5.4 billion per day or a staggering P1.97 trillion per year if the status quo persists.
However, the cost extends beyond macroeconomic data.
Hours spent in traffic add up to lost productivity, lost time with families, and lost opportunities. For the poor who depend most heavily on public transport, the system’s failure means higher costs and fewer economic opportunities.
‘Wasteful’
OVER the past 20 years, the country has built expressways and widened roads-infrastructure that experts say has done more to induce car use than to ease congestion.
Santiago is particularly critical of what he calls ‘trophy’ projects-those favored by politicians, who want visible legacies, and by multilateral lenders who prefer large, easy-to-package loans.
‘A colonial hangover cannot be ignored,’ he said. ‘What works in developed countries is presumed good for the Philippines, regardless of context.’
Siy pointed to road widening projects as especially ‘wasteful.’
‘The most wasteful projects are those that widen roads for private motor vehicles but at the cost of a sidewalk and shade trees,’ he said. ‘In some cases, century-old trees are cut down to add an extra lane for cars.’
The problem with this approach is well established in transportation planning: building more road capacity does not solve congestion.
Instead, it induces more driving through what economists call induced demand. The additional road space attracts more car trips, and within a short time, the new lanes are as congested as the old ones were.
What cities need, experts argue, is investment in modes that can move far more people in far less space: public transport, walking, and cycling.
Yet, Regidor argued, the country keeps repeating the same error.
‘We keep building new roads and bridges and widening these when they are not as urgent as improving public transportation,’ he said. ‘We keep building expressways ahead of railways and other mass transit systems.’
For Siy, the pattern reflects not just technical miscalculation but a question of priorities: who gets to move efficiently through the city, and who does not.
For two decades, investment has answered that question in favor of those who can afford private vehicles, while the majority who depend on public transport have been left with a system in decline.
The transportation department noted in its written responses that it has shifted its focus to developing more mass transit options.
‘Part of the interventions of the department is the improvement of transport service through the construction of railway lines and the modernization of public transport services. This will encourage more people to use public transport rather than personal mobility, the most inefficient way to travel, given the limited road space,’ it said.
Too central, make it regional
PART of what makes reform so difficult, experts agreed, is that the governance structure is misaligned.
Public transportation planning remains under the authority of national agencies-the DOTr and the Land Transportation Franchising and Regulatory Board (LTFRB)-which, according to Siy, ‘lack the capacity and local knowledge to manage transport’ for an entire archipelago.
‘We end up with a few big projects but nothing else. This is an anomaly in our structure,’ he said.
In cities with successful public transport systems, local governments are in charge. London, Seoul, and Bogota all have transportation systems managed by local or regional authorities that understand local needs and can integrate different modes efficiently.
In the Philippines, by contrast, a resident who wants to complain about deficient public transportation must appeal to a national official in Metro Manila rather than to a mayor or governor who could actually respond.
The transportation department said it has taken steps toward decentralizing authority. A 2017 order delegated the formulation of local public transport route plans to local government units (LGUs), and a 2023 order strengthened integration of national and provincial plans.
Still, LGUs lack basic powers. Those that operate public transport services cannot determine fares or even collect them-what Siy called an ‘unreasonable, anachronistic rule.’
Regidor advocated creating metropolitan or regional transport authorities that can take over franchising and regulatory functions from national agencies.
This, he said, would allow cities with capacity and interest to manage their own public transportation, integrating it with economic and social development priorities.
‘A local government cannot shape and influence its economic and social development unless it also has some control over its public transportation services,’ Siy said. ‘At the moment, LGUs have very little control.’
Winners
DESPITE all the setbacks, it would be unfair to say the last 20 years produced nothing. There were projects that did change habits and raise expectations.
The Strong Republic Nautical Highway, launched in the early 2000s, expanded interisland connections through roll-on, roll-off routes, boosting trade and tourism.
The Mactan-Cebu International Airport public-private partnership (PPP) project, awarded in 2014, won international awards and significantly improved passenger services. Sagcal said the project helped establish the Philippines as a credible destination for infrastructure investment.
Likewise, the awarding of the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (Naia) PPP deal in 2024 represents a potential ‘turning point.’
For so many years, Naia has been considered a source of national embarrassment because of its poor infrastructure and services. Terminal 3 was conceptualized in the mid-nineties and nearly completed in the early two-thousands before legal issues stalled it. The terminal did not become fully operational until 2014.
Multiple attempts to improve Naia through private partnerships were thwarted by entrenched business interests.
Sagcal, who witnessed earlier failed attempts, said, ‘Naia may very well be the project that took the longest to unlock politically, and this is consistent with the patterns of our transportation history: We have many well-crafted plans, but the more economically significant the project is, the more interests get in the way of their implementation.’
Furthermore, the Edsa Busway was a ‘cost-effective’ success, according to Siy. By placing public transport on dedicated lanes, the system allows buses to move efficiently with more predictable travel times, free from the congestion that plagues mixed traffic.
Losers
THE Public Utility Vehicle Modernization Program (PUVMP), now called the Public Transport Modernization Program (PTMP), however, embodies both the promise of better transport policy and the pitfalls of poor execution.
On paper, it represented an unprecedented shift: the Omnibus Franchising Guidelines of 2017 devolved route planning to local governments and aimed to consolidate fleets into safer, more efficient operations.
The transportation department framed it as an overdue modernization of services to encourage commuters back to public transport. But experts argue its execution fell far short.
Santiago called the program ‘botched and in limbo,’ warning that some local implementations, such as Davao’s, resembled ‘force-fitting a European jacket on a tropical city.’
Regidor added that the pandemic was a lost opportunity to use the modernization program as a springboard for broader reform.
Before he left for the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH), former Transportation Secretary Vince Dizon started the revamp of the program, given that it was ‘not viable in its present state.’
The obvious losers are easier to catalog. The Northrail project of the Arroyo administration, funded by a Chinese loan, spent $300 million without building a single kilometer of track before being abandoned amid corruption allegations.
A tricycle electrification program backed by a $300-million Asian Development Bank loan was aborted entirely. And then there is Cebu BRT, the project that, Santiago said, may set a ‘global record for execution time.’
And then there are the delayed projects such as the Metro Manila Subway and North-South Commuter Railway, both of which remain years from completion-not to mention the decade-long auction for regional airport PPPs.
Sadly, the pattern of delay persists.
Breaking the status quo
THE next 20 years will be shaped by whether or not the country can address the institutional weaknesses that have plagued the last two decades.
The Department of Transportation, in its written responses, points to several priorities: reforms in planning, project development, implementation, and monitoring; advancement in technologies and sustainable energies; and changes in public behavior toward using mass transportation.
The experts agreed.
What would it take?
Santiago calls for overhauling transport institutions, particularly regulation, through professionalization and devolution. He emphasizes the need for long-tenured technical staff to provide continuity and long-term thinking.
‘[We should] require all major investments to align with master plans and prove economic viability [before receiving funding],’ he said.
Siy argued that the next 20 years will be defined by priorities-specifically, whether the country commits to serving its most vulnerable road users: pedestrians, cyclists, persons with disabilities, and public transport passengers.
‘If we all agree that we will focus on addressing the needs of this very large segment of our population, the future will be bright,’ he said.
The DOTr noted in its responses that some international models should be studied, including London, Seoul, Singapore, and Japan-cities that successfully addressed major transport challenges.
What they share is strong local government control, long-term planning that survives political transitions, and investment prioritized toward public transport over private vehicles.
Regidor argued that political leadership is the most critical factor.
‘We need leaders who will fight for better public transportation, including funding for mass transit systems and implementing public transport reforms to improve not just operations but institutions as well,’ he said.
For Metro Manila specifically, he sees the subway as a game changer because it runs along a corridor different from existing rail lines. But, he cautions, it must be completed as soon as possible as travel demand continues to grow.
Meanwhile, Sagcal advocated for an institutionalization approach, something that former Transportation Secretary Arthur Tugade asked lawmakers for-a transport infrastructure development law.
A legislated infrastructure development plan, Sagcal explained, would shield projects from political changes. He cited Singapore as a model: the city-state has a 50-year concept plan reviewed every 10 years and a detailed 10-to-15-year master plan updated every five years.
This framework allows the government to plan and implement infrastructure projects many years in advance, with continuity across political transitions.
‘We cannot afford to keep changing plans midstream,’ Sagcal said. ‘We must be clinical and seamless from planning to execution.’
‘Cautionary tale’
PERHAPS the most striking aspect of the past 20 years is how predictable the failures have been. Transportation experts warned about the consequences of neglecting public transport, of building roads instead of railways, of allowing institutional memory to erode.
Too bad that the warnings were ignored.
Santiago noted that as early as 1969, studies warned that concentrating infrastructure investments in already congested areas is counterproductive.
‘We’re living that cautionary tale,’ he said.
What the past 20 years revealed is not a lack of knowledge but a failure of will and institutional capacity.
According to the experts interviewed, what it lacks is the political commitment to build institutions strong enough to execute plans across administrations, to shield projects from short-term political calculations, and to prioritize the transportation needs of the many over the convenience of the few.
The next 20 years will show if the cycle of an eternal catch-up finally breaks.
Whether the subway that was needed decades ago will lead to more timely projects in the future. Whether the Cebu BRT – if it escapes its 17-year purgatory-will be the last of its kind. Whether modernization for public utility vehicles can become more than just rhetoric.
For now, the plans continue to pile up. And millions of commuters stand on the roadside, waiting for a better ride that has yet to come.a