Metro Manila traffic: Time to make a drastic move like Indonesia

Anyone who has lived in, worked in or even briefly visited Metro Manila knows that traffic is no longer a nuisance — it has become a national crisis!

- AMBASSADOR B. ROMUALDEZ

A short drive that should only take 20 minutes can now stretch into an hour or more. As a consequence, meetings are missed, productivity is lost, tempers flare and precious family time quietly disappears. In fact, a character in Dan Brown’s 2013 novel “Inferno” described that the “six-hour traffic jams” was like running through the “gates of hell.

”Traffic has become so embedded in daily life that Filipinos create memes and make jokes about “carmageddon.” But beneath the humor lies a harsh truth: the cost to the country is enormous. The Japan International Cooperation Agency has long warned about the economic cost of traffic, estimating it to reach around P4.5 billion per day by 2035 if no significant intervention is made.

For decades, authorities have tried to solve Metro Manila’s nightmarish traffic problem with familiar remedies — flyovers, road widening, number coding schemes, new traffic czars and endless feasibility studies. Yet every new road seems to fill up almost as soon as it opens. The reason is simple - traffic in Metro Manila is not just an infrastructure problem. It is the visible symptom of a much deeper issue: over-centralization.

Nearly everything flows into the metropolis: government power, business headquarters, economic opportunity, education, health care, media and political influence. Millions come not because they want to endure traffic, but because opportunity is concentrated here. As long as Manila remains the gravitational center of the nation, congestion will remain a fact of life.