Iloilo Bike Fest 2026 pedals into fuel-hike, mobility moment

By Joseph Bernard A. Marzan

The 12th edition of the annual Iloilo Bike Festival is fast approaching, and organizers see it as a chance to get Iloilo City residents on their bikes amid growing calls for better active mobility and steep oil price hikes linked to Middle East tensions.

The Iloilo City Government, together with Megaworld’s Iloilo Business Park and Festive Walk Mall and the Iloilo Festivals Foundation Inc., launched the festival at a press conference May 20.

Running for most of June, this year’s festival carries the theme “Flow City: Iloilo on the Move” and kicks off with a celebration of World Bicycle Day on June 3.

That celebration includes an Active Mobility Conference, with Metro Manila Development Authority General Manager Nicolas Torre as keynote speaker, and a city government-led mobility count.

Iloilo City Mayor Raisa Treñas-Chu said during the ceremonial groundbreaking of the city’s end-of-trip facilities that the count will tally both pedestrians and bike commuters, an expansion of the bicycle count the city has run with private and civil society partners in recent years.

The 2025 Bilang Siklista annual count by the nonprofit Mobility Awards recorded 4,716 bicycle trips in Iloilo City, a 33.3 percent decrease from its 2024 report.

Torre will also join the Bike to Work Day on June 5, a route running from the Iloilo Business Park to Sunset Boulevard to Plaza Libertad and back, and will attend the opening program at the Iloilo Business Park afterward.

Organizers will hold a Food Bike Crawl from June 5 to 30 with the Iloilo Hotels, Resorts, and Restaurants Association, featuring a “passport,” with the first 50 to finish receiving special gifts from organizers and partners.

Competitions include the Mega Criterium Race on June 13 and 14, the Push Bike Race for children on June 20, and the Iloilo Duathlon 2.0 on June 21.

The closing day also features the Grand Fun Ride at the Iloilo Business Park, a Battle of the Bands, and the awarding and closing ceremonies.

The festival’s final activity is a new feature, an Electric Vehicle Show on June 30.

Leny Ledesma of the Iloilo City Meetings, Incentives, Conventions, and Exhibitions Center said organizers expect festival attendance of 2,000 to 3,000.

She said the Electric Vehicle Show, which will feature electric cars, bikes, and scooters, aligns with the city’s active mobility advocacy and responds to the current fuel crisis.

“Right now, with the problem with fuel, so many people are asking for alternative ways, so aside from biking, there is also the [electric vehicles]. So, this is not just the cars, we are also inviting scooters and bikes,” Ledesma said.

Former city councilor and current executive assistant to the mayor Jay Treñas, who arrived at the press conference on his bamboo bike, said the theme reinforces the consistent use of bicycles as transportation.

He said that given the current economic and environmental situation, and the city’s goal as a “green city” with “green” spaces, organizers are pushing cycling as a primary form of transportation.

“We need to come back to the root, the reason why we initiated the bike festival. We need to go back to the people. This is the perfect time to promote cycling, in the current state [that] the world is in,” Treñas said.

“We have been promoting cycling as an alternative mode of transport. Now, we should be promoting cycling not as an alternative mode of transport, but a primary choice,” he added.

DEVELOPMENTS

Treñas said public complaints about cars parking in bike lanes are welcome because they have helped improve cycling conditions in the city.

The city’s bike lane ordinances include City Regulation Ordinance No. 2014-193, which requires buildings with parking spaces to allocate space for bicycles, and No. 2016-299, the Benigno Aquino Bike Lane Regulation Ordinance, which penalizes motorists who drive or park in the designated bike lanes along Sen. Benigno Aquino Jr. Avenue, also known as Diversion Road.

“There are a lot of people complaining, and that is what I like. There are many [motor vehicles] parking on the bike lanes, that causes noise, for people to demand the LGU to continue implementing our ordinances and how we can improve [them]. So we are very thankful for people tagging us,” Treñas said.

Ledesma said the festival has been a catalyst for the city’s bike policies, citing the mantra “Build it, and they will come.”

“When I was following and reading up on the history of the bike festival when it started, I realized that if we didn’t do the bike festival, there wouldn’t be policies. There won’t be bike lanes. There wouldn’t be infrastructure that we will be building,” she said.

“In the end, there will be a lot done if we keep pushing it. [Cycling as] primary transport, it’s really something that we have to push because in the end, we built this city for people,” she added.