Built the Flyover. Skipped the Network. Surprised?

Two days after the PHP 315-million Buhang Flyover reopened, a wing van knocked down its clearance barrier. Not a dramatic collapse — just a truck that shouldn’t have been there in the first place, doing exactly what trucks on that corridor have always done.

The response was fast and familiar: tighten enforcement, cite the driver, call for better signage. That’s not wrong. But it also isn’t enough. And at this point, after everything this corridor has been through, we should be asking harder questions than how big the next gantry should be.

The Buhang Flyover has a load capacity of roughly 31 tonnes. Before it was shut down for repairs in January, trucks weighing between 50 and 82 tonnes — including container trucks from Dumangas Port — had been using it regularly. Vehicles nearly three times the rated capacity, on a structure that DPWH Secretary Vince Dizon later said had failed not primarily because of overloading but because of substandard workmanship. Repair costs, he clarified, would be shouldered by the contractor — F. Gurrea Construction, Inc., which built the flyover for PHP 520 million.

So we have a structure that was built wrong and then used wrong, and is now open again with a clearance gantry as the primary line of defense. One that a wing van destroyed on the second night.

The Buhang Flyover was built along Circumferential Road-1 crossing the Iloilo-Capiz Road, partly to make travel faster and more convenient toward Iloilo’s coastal areas — which means toward Dumangas. The trucks were always going to come. The prohibition on heavy vehicles was bolted on after the fact, imposed on a route that hadn’t changed because the alternatives hadn’t been built.

Nobody is saying the driver was right. But one PHP 5,000 fine doesn’t explain why trucks have been using a 31-tonne flyover to haul 82-tonne loads from Dumangas Port for two years.

The Ungka Flyover is a parallel case — and a preview. By September 2025, the Ungka Flyover gantry had been struck four times. A modernized bus hit it in December 2024, a modern jeepney knocked it down in April 2025, and a wing van damaged the newly repaired gantry just two days later. Each incident produced the same cycle: repair, fine, call for better signage, repeat. Motorists noted that the signs were too small and only visible when drivers were already near the entrance, and that the barriers made it nearly impossible for large vehicles to turn around once they realized the restriction. Four strikes on the same bar, same flyover, same corridor. At some point the bar isn’t the problem.

Meanwhile, the PHP 802-million Aganan Flyover in Pavia — which sits on the same freight corridor — remains unfinished years after construction was suspended. Its absence pushes more pressure onto C-1. These aren’t separate stories. They’re connected symptoms.

Daily Guardian raised this concern as far back as January 2023, asking DPWH whether the contractors on Buhang, Jibao-an, and other flyover projects were on schedule, and noting that information on publicly funded projects was being treated as if it were proprietary data. Three years later, the question still stands.

None of this absolves the driver who hit the gantry. He violated a clear ordinance and should face the consequences. And enforcement matters — truck ban windows need actual teeth, not just PHP 5,000 citations that barely register as an operating cost for a commercial hauler. Weigh stations at corridor entry points would catch violations before they reach the structure, not after.

But enforcement has a ceiling if the underlying routing problem is never solved. Small traders and informal haulers use C-1 because no viable alternative exists for them yet. Circumferential Roads 2, 3, and 4 are under construction, but freight isn’t waiting for C-3. It moves on the roads already in front of it.

The infrastructure was delivered. The network it was supposed to serve never fully materialized. And so the system keeps expressing the same mismatch — a gantry at a time.