Commission Formally Acknowledges Congestion Has Existed Long Enough to Be Considered Part of Manila’s Natural Landscape

METRO MANILA, PHILIPPINES — The Metropolitan Manila Development Authority has quietly reclassified the chronic traffic congestion on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, commonly known as EDSA, from an “infrastructure problem” to a “stable urban feature,” in a bureaucratic shift that acknowledges what 12 million daily commuters have known for years: EDSA traffic is not a crisis that will be solved. It is a condition that will be managed, which is different, and the distinction matters less than the commute time, which has not improved.

The Reclassification: What It Means

The change in categorization, buried in an MMDA traffic management framework document released last month, moves EDSA congestion from the “problems requiring resolution” column to the “managed chronic conditions” column, alongside flooding in low-lying areas, informal settlements near waterways, and the question of what to do about jeepneys, which has been in the managed-chronic-condition category since approximately 1970.

“Calling it a problem implies it can be solved,” explained a traffic engineer at the MMDA who agreed to speak on background because he has to work with the people who signed off on this framework. “By calling it a feature, we acknowledge its permanence and shift our mandate from elimination to optimization. This is not giving up. This is being realistic. This is the mature institutional response to a situation that has defeated every previous attempt at resolution.”

He then looked out his window at EDSA and sighed in the specific way that traffic engineers in Manila have been sighing since the elevated expressways were first proposed in the 1990s.

EDSA: Its History

EDSA was named after Epifanio de los Santos, a Filipino historian, and is best known for two things: the 1986 People Power Revolution that ended the Marcos dictatorship, during which millions of Filipinos filled the highway in a peaceful expression of democratic will, and the approximately 362 days per year on which it is impossible to get from one end to the other in under ninety minutes. The highway is simultaneously the most historically significant road in the Philippines and the most practically problematic one, which is a combination that Philippine urban planning has not fully resolved.

Traffic volume on EDSA exceeds its design capacity by approximately three times. This has been true for two decades. The solutions proposed over this period include a second deck, a dedicated bus rapid transit system (the EDSA Busway, which exists and helps at the margins), an elevated rail (which exists), more rail (which is under construction), and behavioral nudges through coding schemes that have been tried, revised, appealed, and reimplemented so many times that the coding scheme itself is now a stable geological feature of the Manila regulatory landscape.

The Commuter Experience: Unchanged

For the 12 million people who use EDSA daily in some capacity, the reclassification changes nothing except the nomenclature. A woman named Ate Charo who commutes from Caloocan to Makati every working day said she had heard about the reclassification and found it “typical.” She said she leaves home at 5 a.m. to arrive at work by 8 a.m., a ratio of preparation to transit time that she has calculated represents approximately 2,600 hours per year spent in proximity to EDSA, which is more time than she spends on most other activities except sleeping.

“They can call it a feature, a problem, a challenge, a characteristic, whatever they want,” Ate Charo said, adjusting her umbrella in the sun outside a bus terminal. “I still have to be here at 5 a.m. Nothing they call it makes that different.”

The Proposed Solutions: Ongoing

Despite the reclassification, the MMDA maintains an active portfolio of traffic management interventions including signal timing optimization, number coding enforcement, intermodal hubs, and a behavioral economics pilot program that rewards commuters for traveling off-peak with discounted transit fares. The program has shown measurable results in shifting approximately 3 percent of peak-hour trips to off-peak hours, which traffic engineers describe as “significant in relative terms” and commuters describe as “nice but not enough to matter to me specifically.”

The Busway: Actually Helping

Amid the general EDSA pessimism, one development deserves credit: the EDSA Carousel Bus Rapid Transit system, launched in 2020 and expanded since, carries approximately 800,000 passengers per day along the dedicated center lane, which is closed to private vehicles during peak hours. The system is not perfect — overcrowding during peak hours remains a challenge, and the station infrastructure is functional rather than comfortable — but it demonstrably moves more people faster than the general traffic flow, and represents the kind of investment in mass transit that traffic engineers have recommended for EDSA for decades. Its expansion to full BRT standards, with proper stations, cashless payment integration, and connecting feeder routes, would represent a genuine improvement. The MMDA and DOTr have announced plans for this expansion. The plans are real. The timeline is “ongoing,” which means it will happen after some things and before other things, and nobody can say precisely when.

The Busway expansion plan, the bike lane program, and the pedestrianization pilots underway in parts of Makati and Bonifacio Global City represent a portfolio of interventions that, taken together, suggest Metro Manila is approaching its mobility crisis with more tools than it once had, even if the crisis itself remains larger than any single tool can address.

For Metro Manila traffic and transport news, see Manila Bulletin. For MMDA updates and infrastructure reporting, visit Inquirer.net. For urban transport analysis in Southeast Asia, see Bangkok Post.