If other countries can do it, why can’t we?
Many Filipinos see other countries’ “Instagrammable” transport systems and public spaces and rightly ask: why does our public transport remain a dehumanizing experience? Don’t we deserve public parks and pedestrian-friendly sidewalks?
It is terribly frustrating—especially when the average annual budget for public infrastructure for the past 10 years is about P1 trillion. Unless the government—both politicians and bureaucrats—overhauls how it creates infrastructure, this huge spending will never translate into actual facilities that we Filipinos can be proud of.
In my 15 years of experience working on infrastructure, I have seen many ways of understanding how our dream of a better public infrastructure remains a nightmare. Yet I am certain that like many other countries, we can have world-class public infrastructure.
However, the first step to solving the problem is recognizing that there is one. Of all the ways to name it, the one that matters most is this: our system has been failing to consistently put the public front and center of our public infrastructure.
And we see this every day. Let’s take those footbridges. Why do people choose to not use them and risk jaywalking instead? Somehow, the acceptable answer has become Filipinos’ lack of discipline, not an issue of public infrastructure. But what if it is because we picked the wrong infrastructure solutions in the first place? The same can be asked of our road solutions. Why do road expansion projects always get implemented at the expense of narrower sidewalks?
In both instances, the people are not the priority. Those projects literally pave the way for motorized vehicles, most of them private cars, to have smoother traffic flow. It comes at the expense of the public’s convenience.
Nowhere is this issue on greater display than with mass transport. Developing mass transport systems is not a piece of cake. It requires many institutions to work: those paving road networks, those ensuring seamless connectivity of buses and trains, those regulating private and public vehicles, and those ensuring daily traffic enforcement.
“Completed” projects may make for nice photo ops, but do not necessarily translate to good public infrastructure. Just look at the infamous Mt. Kamuning that crosses MRT-3 and the notoriously long, (un)connected transfer between LRT-2 and MRT-3.
These are a showcase of weak institutional coordination that sidetracks the people in our public infrastructure. If people were indeed central in these projects, we would have spent all government power and resources to deliver the best service experience for our people.
The good news is that there are opportunities to make this happen. For instance, public-private partnerships (PPPs). In PPPs, the government enters into a contract with a private company and jointly deliver quality public infrastructure and services. These arrangements create incentives for both the government and its partners to make them work in return for trade-offs.
When they do, the government or the users of the infrastructure pay fees to the private sector in order to fulfill its mandate to deliver quality public services. Meanwhile, the private sector fast tracks the delivery of the infrastructure in return for earning a reasonable profit from PPP contracts. These arrangements made a number of critical projects possible such as the North and South Luzon Expressways, the beautiful airports in Clark and Cebu, and the online, quick-delivery service of our birth certificates.
In 2023, the government enacted the PPP Code of the Philippines, further strengthening PPPs in the country by creating new enforcement mechanisms that could address the lessons learned from our failed attempts at infrastructure development for the past three decades, and that of our international neighbors.
With the new law, the private sector has expressed their continued willingness to share their financial and innovation-based know-how through participating in this new era of PPPs. There are also interest groups willing to collaborate with public and private decision-makers to make more informed people-centric public infrastructure designs.
If we have any hope of getting that Instagrammable infrastructure we deserve, we need to harness PPPs as a pathway, utilize the modernized PPP law, and rally stakeholders with shared interests. This is not to say that PPPs are a fail-proof mechanism that will magically solve our infrastructure dilemma nor are they the best (or always the better) way. But they do create an opportunity for the whole society to reform how we deliver public infrastructure.
It is easier said than done, but we cannot afford a business-as-usual scenario. At the very least, we owe it to ourselves to try. Now.
—————-
Jeffrey Manalo is a career public servant specializing in public infrastructure and PPPs. He is currently completing his mid-career master’s degree at the Harvard Kennedy School. He writes in his personal capacity.
