FOR Bonifacio Global City (BGC) to deserve its title as a 'global city,' it needs to work very hard on improving its mobility environment. Public transportation, walking and cycling should be safe, convenient and attractive for any resident or visitor. This is far from the case today: BGC's public transportation is inadequate and active transport (walking and cycling) conditions leave much to be desired. If many Filipinos feel that a private vehicle is their best option to get in and out of BGC, we can expect BGC's urban environment to deteriorate further, undermining BGC's efforts to be recognized as a world-class business and residential district.

Poor quality public transport merits a big red mark for BGC. In a globally competitive city, the expectation is that public transport services are abundant, efficient and predictable. Today, BGC fails on all these aspects — public transport queues are long, buses are crowded and often stuck in traffic, and bus schedules and travel times are unreliable. Another irritant is the demise of the BGC Bus tracking app — it used to be that BGC Bus passengers could see the estimated bus arrival times on their phones, which enabled them to better plan their schedules. BGC's public transportation can be improved by expanding the size of the public transport fleet, increasing the frequency of services on core routes, placing buses on exclusive lanes and giving passengers real-time information on bus availability.