THE North Luzon Expressway (NLEX) turned into a flooded parking lot this past week. Travel time on stretches normally covered in under an hour ballooned to as long as six hours, with motorists reporting nonmoving traffic that, at its peak, stretched roughly 9 to 10 kilometers through the San Simon, Pampanga, area (GMA News, Live Traffic Updates, Sept. 2, 2026). The proximate cause was flooding brought by the southwest monsoon, or habagat, which submerged portions of the tollway near the Tulaoc and San Simon interchanges, and forced the NLEX Corp. to shut down lanes and divert traffic for days.
But flooding alone does not explain why hundreds of thousands of motorists were left stranded, hungry and thirsty, for hours on a supposedly “premier” expressway. That is an epic management failure on the part of NLEX Corp.
My own experience
I was one of the motorists trapped in that mess. I left Metro Manila northbound at 10 a.m. on Aug. 29 and did not reach Marilao — the exit immediately after Meycauayan — until 3:09 p.m. My usual one-hour drive stretched into more than five hours. NLEX Corp. itself had reported flooding earlier that same Saturday affecting the middle and rightmost lanes in the area following the overflow of the Meycauayan River. I have photographs I took of the flooded stretch and of the patrol vehicles on site.
What made the ordeal worse was not just the floodwaters on the road — it was how NLEX personnel managed the bottleneck. At the Meycauayan Exit, patrollers had parked their patrol vehicles in the middle lane, effectively forcing everyone into a single inner lane. Class 3 and 4 vehicles — trucks and buses — technically could still use Lanes 3 and 4, but were instead being herded into Lane 1 alongside ordinary Class 1 cars. The result was chaotic, though predictable: private vehicles boxed in with heavy trucks in the same narrow lane, crawling at a fraction of normal speed. This was not an act of God. It was a traffic-management decision, and it was a bad one. NLEX management could have done better.
Terminate NLEX executives
Manny V. Pangilinan (MVP) needs to change the executives running NLEX Corp. He must bring in people who can actually manage a crisis like this one, rather than making it worse through poor lane discipline and ad hoc rerouting. It is also worth asking why, years after a similar flood-driven jam struck the same San Simon stretch in 2023, the tollway still goes under water every time the monsoon hits (GMA News Explainer report).
According to a Rappler report on Sept. 1, 2026, NLEX Corp., through operator Metro Pacific Tollways Corp. (MPTC), has said it plans to eventually raise the northbound and southbound pavements in Tulaoc once the Tulaoc Bridge elevation project is completed. But “eventually” is not good enough for a company that collects toll fees every single day. There are engineering solutions to a problem that is now recurring annually. A company with MPTC’s resources should have implemented them long before this year’s rains, not after another round of public outrage.
TRB’s regulatory failure
The regulatory failure runs all the way up the chain of command. The Toll Regulatory Board’s (TRB) response to a multiday, monstrous, standstill jam was a letter — directing NLEX Corp. president and general manager Luis Renon to monitor Pampanga and Tulaoc river water levels and issue advisories three hours ahead of expected rainfall. (While a complete verbatim copy of the entire official document has not been published as text, excerpts released to the press detail the Aug. 31, 2026, directive from the TRB to NLEX Corp. The order instructs NLEX to monitor water levels, provide early warnings via SMS, VMS and other platforms three hours before anticipated rainfall closures and coordinate flood mitigation efforts). No fine. No suspension of operations. No penalty of any kind for an operator whose own infrastructure has now flooded in the same spot for at least two years running. This is failure to regulate.
A regulator that only ever writes letters has effectively surrendered its enforcement power to the entity it is supposed to police. TRB officials who cannot bring themselves to sanction a repeat offender should be replaced outright by Acting Transportation Secretary Giovanni Lopez, who as of this crisis has done little beyond issuing his own public advisories urging motorists to avoid NLEX (GMA News, “Palace to motorists: Avoid NLEX as flooding persists”).
Ultimately, by the principle of command responsibility — the same standard the public rightly demands of officials in the chain of command during any institutional failure — if the TRB under his department cannot or will not discipline a chronically failing tollway operator, Acting Secretary Lopez himself should no longer be “Acting” — he should resign.
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