ON Sept. 12, 2026, business columnist Robert Siy published the article “Why the EDSA busway matters” in your newspaper. Please allow me to correct certain inaccuracies in that column and to provide some other details to fill important omissions.
The EDSA busway was initiated on June 1, 2020, not July 2021, as written in your article. I distinctly remembered this as it was the first day of the relaxation of the Covid-19 lockdown. Transportation Secretary Arturo Tugade decided the initial line to start from North EDSA and end at Ayala Avenue in Makati. It was also the first day of bus service contracting where buses and drivers were paid on fee basis and no longer on the “boundary” system.
My article “Don’t Waste a Crisis” was published in the Star newspaper on May 10, 2020. It urged the implementation of public bus reforms to take advantage of the lean traffic condition occasioned by the pandemic. For decades since the war, bus transportation on EDSA was on the curbside lanes with buses contributing to heavy traffic conditions. There were no viable alternatives.
On May 12, 2020 the Finex board endorsed my bus reform. A letter was written by Finex president Jeng Pascual and me, as chairman of the national affairs committee, to Secretary Tugade to urge implementation. On May 13, I invited you (columnist Robert Siy) to present your active transport advocacy — bike lanes — in the Finex special forum on traffic, while I presented my busway reforms advocacy.
On the following Monday, May 18, 2020, Secretary Tugade invited me to present my busway reform on EDSA to the Department of Transportation land sector team headed by Undersecretary Stephen Pastor, while LTFRB chairman Chuck Delgra presented his busway carousel line proposal on EDSA. Thereupon, it was decided by the DOTr to implement the EDSA busway with the Carousel line on June 1, 2020.
It took only two weeks for MMDA to install the barriers to create the dedicated busway on the leftmost lane alongside the MRT-3. On that fateful day on June 1, I boarded the bus at 8 a.m. at North EDSA and videotaped the trip. CHP troopers were assigned to monitor and supervise traffic on EDSA. The busway then had just two stops — at SM Megamall and Guadalupe. The trip took just 27 minutes to arrive at Ayala Ave. in Makati, while private vehicles on the three adjoining lanes were stuck in bumper-to- bumper traffic. This proved the busway concept and the start of the new normal on EDSA — busway free of congestion while private vehicles suffered bumper-to-bumper traffic on their three lanes.
Five years earlier, the Management Association of the Philippines organized the traffic and infrastructure committee because of the eight-hour long carmageddon which saw commuters stranded on the streets due to a heavy rainstorm. I was appointed chairman of the committee and on Aug. 26, 2018 submitted my PowerPoint position paper that included the EDSA busway. But it took five years of advocacy until conditions became ripe for the busway’s implementation. But this didn’t stop me from writing articles advocating the busway. The only other one who did was Boo Chanco.
Currently, we in the MAP committee are working, quietly, with Secretary Banoy to remedy the zero budget of the busway.
Eduardo H. Yap
Chairman
Traffic, Transportation and Infrastructure Committee
Management Association of the Philippines
