One problem for another

A little over a year ago, the Philippine Ports Authority was selling Ilonggos a different story. In March 2025, its Panay-Guimaras manager Alan Rojo pitched Fort San Pedro as the city’s future roll-on, roll-off hub, with the plan to pull operations out of Lapuz Wharf and even Dumangas and gather them in one place. The agency assured everyone the expansion would spare the heritage areas – Rotary Park and Muelle Loney, named outright.

Now the same agency wants additional RoRo ramps along Muelle Loney and Lapuz Road. So which is it?

That is the question the Institute of Contemporary Economics put to the council this week, and it is the right one. ICE is not against the Iloilo–Guimaras crossing. Nobody serious is. PPA justified the ramps by pointing to growing ship calls and rising RoRo demand, and that pressure is real – thousands of workers, students, patients, and traders make that run, and the queues are not imaginary.

But a real transport problem can still be answered with a bad piece of planning. We have watched the reverse work. The city spent roughly PHP 1.12 billion turning a neglected dike road into the 9-kilometer Iloilo River Esplanade, then another PHP 2.26 billion on the Sunset Boulevard extension. Riverfront land that once changed hands at PHP 2,000 to PHP 3,000 per square meter now trades many times higher. The Esplanade took the 2024 Asian Townscape Award in Fukuoka last November. None of that is nostalgia. It is the measurable return on refusing to treat the waterfront as a parking lane.

Muelle Loney is not an empty lot waiting for a use. It is the quay named for Nicholas Loney, whose sugar trade built modern Iloilo. Lining it with idling vehicles is the sort of call that looks tidy on a traffic engineer’s slide and looks ruinous in twenty years.

And nothing in this country is as permanent as a temporary fix. ICE’s sharpest point is the quiet one: ramps create users, routes, habits, enforcement details, and eventually political defenders. Once the trucks have their lane, no councilor wants to be the one who takes it back. The window to say no closes the moment that constituency forms.

This is not an argument for doing nothing. PPA already wrote down the better answer – San Pedro. Send the heavy RoRo function to a port built for it, tighten berth scheduling and turnaround at the existing terminals to bleed off some of the pressure now, and if an interim ramp truly cannot be avoided, attach a sunset clause with a real date and teeth.

The burden sits with PPA, not the council. Before a single ramp goes in, the agency should explain why San Pedro no longer works, why operations cannot be reformed first, and how lining the river’s edge with vehicles fits a city that has spent more than a decade, and billions, winning that same edge back.

Answer that, or pick a better spot.