Senator Joseph Victor “JV” Ejercito on Tuesday, January 10 urged the government to expedite efforts to modernize the transportation system in the Philippines and make it at par with its neighbors in the Southeast Asian region.
Ejercito, vice chairman of the Senate Committee on Public Services, lamented that the country’s transport system is at least 30 years behind its neighboring countries.
“My estimate is that we’re about thirty, thirty-five years behind in terms of infrastructure development and transportation modernization compared to our neighbors,” Ejercito said in an interview on ANC's Headstart.
The senator also said the country’s current investments in infrastructure development and transportaiton modernization are still far from the ideal.
“For several decades, we have not really invested much on transport the way our ASEAN neighbors did. We are only investing about two percent of the Gross Domestic Product. It’s supposed to be five percent for infrastructure development,” he said.
Ejercito said the government should further improve the country’s transportation system as it would boost ongoing efforts to revive the economy after being battered by the Covid-19 pandemic.
“With transportation, with railway systems, more than airports, movement of people, movement of goods will be easier,” he said.
“That will attract, of course, foreign investments. That will make doing business easy and more convenient,” the Senator said.
Ejercito said transportation modernization and infrastructure development would be costly “but I think the returns to the economy will be enormous.”
The lawmaker, on Monday, January 9, joined President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., officials from the Department of Transportation, and representatives from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) in launching the tunnel boring machine for the Metro Manila Subway System project.
Ejercito was the staunchest defender of the subway’s proposed funding during the Senate’s deliberations on the 2023 national budget.
“With the launching of the subway's tunnel boring machine, which will be used for excavating along the project's route from Valenzuela to the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA), we are now one step closer in making the country's first ever subway system a reality,” the lawmaker said in his social media post.
“With the poor state of our country's transportation system, railway is the only way,” the lawmaker stressed.