Transport/Infrastructure Politics in the Philippines

Over the past five years, through my work for the Coalitions for Change program in the Philippines, I have become increasingly interested in the political economy of transportation and infrastructure in the country. I've been somewhat surprised by this new obsession, especially as someone in his mid-50s who never played with electric trains as a child or had any interest in fast cars as a young man. In retrospect, I was a big fan of the rock band Traffic when I was a teenager, I had something of a fixation on provincial buses while researching local politics in the Philippines in the 1990s, and one of the published articles I am most proud of used the analogy of a 'total' traffic jam/gridlock as the basis for an analysis of the unravelling of the Suharto regime in Indonesia in 1998. And one of my all-time favourite books about politics, Robert Caro's The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York: Knopf, 1974), focuses on the political history of the transportation system of my hometown, New York City. So perhaps this 'new' obsession has been long in the making.

In any event, it's been thanks to transport gurus like Dr. Robie Siy and transport reform advocacy groups like Move Metro