Commuters in Manila dream of starting at 5am instead of 4am
SHOULD YOU get up at 4am to get to work on time, or risk waiting until five? That is the question confronting many commuters in Manila, the capital of the Philippines, which has some of the world’s worst traffic jams. Geography is one reason: the 2m people trying to get in and out of the metropolis each day must squeeze into a narrow strip between the sea on one side and a lake and hills on the other. But poor urban planning and a dearth of infrastructure investment in recent decades have compounded the problem. Filipinos spend 16 days a year stuck in jams, according to the Boston Consulting Group. The World Economic Forum ranks the Philippines 96th of 141 countries for the quality of its infrastructure. Nearby Indonesia, another nation of thousands of islands, is 72nd.
On January 17th the public-works minister announced that by the time President Rodrigo Duterte leaves office in 2022, he wants to have cut the number of cars that pass along the city’s main artery each day by a third. Such bold declarations have been characteristic of Mr Duterte’s approach to infrastructure. When he became president in 2016 he considered demanding emergency powers from Congress to help him deal with the traffic. In the end, he settled instead on a long-term scheme to spend 9trn pesos ($177bn) on new infrastructure called “Build, Build, Build”. The...