TWO years ago, I was invited to speak at the TEDx event hosted by the remarkable students of British School Manila. In that event, I decided to speak about my thoughts as a city designer and builder with regard to the horrendous and paralyzing Metro Manila traffic. Aside from the debilitating turtle-paced flow of vehicles that drain the energy of every commuter and driver, economists estimate that the Metro Manila traffic congestion hit our economy hard with approximately P3.5 billion daily loss. If we look at it on an annual basis, that is a whooping P1.27 trillion loss to our economy, which is equal to 20 percent of the 2025 national budget. This amount could power our economy to progress instead of enduring budget cuts to vital services such as education, health and others.

However, despite this glaring economic data and the everyday experience of Metro Manila residents, our leaders fail horribly to solve the problem. We keep on building roads, and yet traffic volume simply overwhelms them immediately. It is, thus, a welcome development that they now begin to look at improving our mass transport system by building the rail lines. But building transport infrastructures takes decades to implement while the need to solve the problem is now.