Senators suggested commuters in the 620 sq km metropolis make more journeys on foot, saying the government could set aside money in next year’s budget to build a collection of elevated walkways.

Grace Poe, who chairs the Senate’s committee on public services, said walking would both get the city moving and have health benefits.

The solutions have been offered amid grumbles among residents of the world’s 18th largest city about the latest failed experiment by the Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA) to cut congestion on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue (EDSA), a major highway that circles the capital.

The agency, which manages the city’s traffic, in June banned provincial buses from entering the urban area and restricted all buses plying EDSA to two “yellow lanes”. But the result has been what local media have labelled “monster” jams.

Buses and trains from outside Manila bring in some 2 million people daily, meaning the city’s nighttime population of 12.8 million swells to 15 million during the day, according to urban planning expert Nathaniel von Einsiedel.

Manila’s traffic jams are so bad, even Duterte has been forced to admit failure

Duterte, whose presidential office has direct control of the MMDA, has come under pressure to make good on an election campaign promise to cut congestion by his sixth month in office. He even bragged in June: “You just wait … [come December] you don’t have to worry about traffic. Cubao and Makati [business districts] are just about five minutes away.”

Currently commuters are lucky if they traverse the 10.2km EDSA stretch between Cubao and Makati in 45 minutes. Manila’s Highway Patrol Group said it completed the journey in four minutes, but that was at 1am with a police escort.

The organisation has said it will shut down all provincial bus terminals along EDSA and strictly enforce the MMDA’s policies in order to meet Duterte’s New Year deadline.

The new rules on provincial buses have drawn fire from commuter rights advocacy group AltMobility PH, which said the regulations prioritised private vehicles over public transport.

“Much of the decision was made with vehicles in mind or the flow of traffic in mind. Our banner call is for officials to really start focusing on the welfare of commuters and ... to design solutions for transport that are responsive and sustainable,” director Ira Cruz told the Post.

Solutions to Manila’s infamous traffic jams may be underground and on the water

His group said the “yellow lane” policy and provincial bus ban discriminated against the poor.

Some 1 million people use the 23.8km EDSA daily. Cruz said 70 per cent of those were commuters who collectively took up about 40 per cent of the road space, while the remaining 30 per cent of the users were in private vehicles but occupied up to 60 per cent of the highway.

Karl Mercado, a commuter using EDSA on August 7 during a dry run for the provincial bus ban, posted on Facebook a photo showing a long line of buses hardly moving, while cars zipped by in the other lanes.

“I’m just a commuter and I come from the provinces. I don’t deserve equal treatment?” Mercado said sarcastically.

Cruz said he had heard many horror stories of commuters arriving home at 10pm then having to wake up at 4am to get back to work. He said a decent public transport system was needed and AltMobility was lobbying Congress to pass a commuter rights law.

The ‘trolley boys’ who dance with death on Manila’s railway carts

Another election promise by Duterte, to improve Manila Metro Rail Transit System Line 3 (MRT Line 3), which runs alongside EDSA, has not materialised. Breakdowns, a lack of spare parts and an ageing system mean its seven operational trains now only carry an average of 207,000 commuters daily, down from the 463,000 passengers in 2017.

Einsiedel, who was once Metro Manila’s urban planning chief as well as regional director in the Asia-Pacific region of the United Nations Urban Management Programme, told the Post the MRT “is wrongly designed”.

He said MRT3 “should not have been a light rail because it has limited capacity. It needed to be a heavy rail project, but because it was a private company that did it, it scrimped”.

“We ended up with an ill-designed system that is difficult to expand in terms of capacity,” he said.

“The solution to EDSA traffic is really reducing the number of cars, which is kind of difficult to do, because the alternative [the MRT Line 3] is very inefficient.”

A former transport sector official who wished to remain anonymous said traffic had worsened due to the yellow lane policy, a record number of car sales and the practice of paying bus drivers per trip and on a commission basis.

Records from the Land Transportation Office show Metro Manila had 2.79 million registered motor vehicles last year, 8 per cent more than the 2.6 million in 2017.

The ex-official suggested the MMDA introduce “congestion pricing” similar to that in Singapore, where private cars are made to pay a fixed amount at certain hours when entering congested areas.

“I think right now the Land Transportation Office is already installing RFID [radio-frequency identification] tags on cars,” he said, which would make the process easier.

The money raised from such a scheme could subsidise financial incentives for bus companies and drivers to meet reliability and service standards and do away with driver commission.

“Congestion pricing definitely should be considered because that is one way we could help pay for the public transit improvements we all want.”

For Einsiedel, long-term solutions include abolishing the MMDA and turning Metro Manila into a special province headed by an elected official. He said the Philippine constitution allowed local government units to organise into a bigger structure to address certain problems.

But the 16 mayors of the component cities that make up Metro Manila disliked the idea because it would lessen their power, Einsiedel added.

He said nobody wanted to take responsibility for EDSA as it traversed six cities, and “that’s the problem”.

“There is no immediate solution to EDSA,” Einsiedel said, adding that the problem had simmered over time like a frog being slowly boiled in water.