Manila’s traffic jams are so bad, even President Rodrigo Duterte has been forced to admit failure
- A 2015 survey by GPS-based navigation app Waze found that Manila had the world’s worst traffic congestion
- The government has made some headway on an US$180 billion programme to modernise roads, railways and airports
It’s 3.30am in the Philippines and much of San Jose Del Monte is fast asleep. Flashlight in hand, street sweeper Alejandro Galasao, 58, navigates a labyrinth of alleys to a main road to catch a bus to the capital Manila 30km away.
He has to wake up in the middle of the night for a job that doesn’t start until 6am. Traffic is so bad in Manila that if he leaves any later, there’s no way he will clock in on time.
“If I go to work at rush hour, it would take me three hours,” Galasao said. “This is the only job I know. Even if I find something else, I doubt I would earn any better.”
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Metro Manila, a sprawl of 16 cities fused together by outdated infrastructure, is creaking under the weight of millions of vehicles, owing largely to economic growth of more than 6 per cent a year since 2012.
Urban rail coverage is limited, trains are prone to breakdowns and queues spill onto streets where exhaust fumes are intoxicating.
A 2015 survey by GPS-based navigation app Waze found that Manila had the world’s worst traffic congestion, partly due to a tripling of annual car sales from a decade ago. Quality of life is poor for many urban Filipinos, who spend a chunk of their day commuting.
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Janice Sarad works at a bank head office and leaves home four hours before work starts in Bonifacio Global City, a Manila business hub. On a typical day, Sarad, 22, takes a train, a bus and two passenger jeeps to get to work.
“In the morning, it’s even more difficult to commute because the pressure not to be late is there. You really have to fight your way in,” she said.
Oliver Emocling, 23, rides the train, but queues are so long that he arrives late often, and has been docked wages as punishment.
“When I get home, it’s already 10pm,” said Emocling, who works at a magazine. “I could be using that time to sleep more, rest more. Instead, my time gets wasted”.
The daily loss of business in Manila due to traffic woes has risen to 3.5 billion pesos (US$67.2 million) in 2017 from 2.4 billion pesos in 2012, according to the Japan International Cooperation Agency.
Ferdinand Tan, a 53-year-old wealth coach, lets his staff work from home and has modified his van to cope with traffic, turning it into a mobile office with a power supply, computer and even a foot massager.
“No one can really solve the traffic. So instead of complaining about it, I try to maximise [the time],” he said. “I use unproductive time to be productive”.
