By Chuck Baclagon

Senior Strategy and Communications Advisor, 350 Pilipinas

Last May 19 to 23, I found myself moving between two profoundly different conversations about the future of transport in Asia. One was the Asia Pacific Transport Forum, convened by the Asian Development Bank. The other was the #MoveTogether Regional Exchange, organized by The Climate Reality Project Philippines and the Clean Mobility Collective Southeast Asia (CMC-SEA) network with the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities and partners including the International Climate Initiative (IKI), GIZ Philippines, and the Antipolo City Government. Both took place in Ortigas, deep inside one of Metro Manila’s densest business districts—a fitting location, because the journey between the venues often said more about the state of mobility than the panels themselves.

There’s something clarifying about discussing “inclusive transport systems” while standing in the heat waiting for my ride, navigating crowded transit lines, crossing hostile intersections, or walking streets designed primarily for cars. I normally bike to most places—I’m fortunate enough to live less than three kilometers from where I usually work, a privilege that allows me to avoid much of Metro Manila’s daily commuting grind. But with both events held in Ortigas, combined with the punishing heat index of Manila’s summer, cycling across the city became difficult even for me. The week turned into an accidental immersion into the realities millions of Filipinos face every day: long commutes, expensive transport fares from ride hailing services, unreliable systems, and urban environments that quietly punish anyone moving without a private vehicle.

At the Asia Pacific Transport Forum, the conversation was understandably large in scale. Ministers, development bankers, and policy experts spoke about regional connectivity, financing frameworks, infrastructure pipelines, and institutional coordination. These conversations matter; Asia desperately needs investment in transport systems that can survive both climate disruption and economic volatility. But there is always a danger in rooms like these: mobility can become abstract. The commuter can disappear into spreadsheets. The jeepney driver can become a data point. Walking can become an “active transport indicator” rather than the lived exhaustion of crossing a city built around traffic flow instead of human dignity.

What struck me most was how often transport is still framed primarily as an engineering or financing challenge, when it is equally a behavioral and social one. Real transformation is not simply about building infrastructure; it is about creating conditions that make people want to choose safer, cleaner, and more collective ways of moving. That requires asking a fundamental question: how do we facilitate a process that intrinsically motivates our stakeholders to respond to our interventions? To answer that, we must understand where people are actually coming from—their economic anxieties, daily habits, survival strategies, and everyday friction points.

That was where the spirit of #MoveTogether felt entirely different. Rather than debating theoretical frameworks and projections in the abstract, this regional exchange grounded itself in lived realities and replicable local solutions. Winners of the 2025 Southeast Asia Mobility Awards shared firsthand, real-world experiences from cities like Jakarta, George Town, Semarang, Quezon City, and Iloilo, demonstrating how inclusive transport policies, active mobility infrastructure, and people-centered urban design can successfully move from aspiration to implementation.

What made this gathering especially compelling was its emphasis on mobility not simply as infrastructure, but as culture, participation, and shared civic life. The launch of the Philippine chapter of Women on the Move: Transforming Transport in Asia reinforced the idea that safer, more equitable, and inclusive cities must directly address gender equity and representation in urban planning. This philosophy was brought to life through a #JanesWalk, inspired by urban activist Jane Jacobs, which transformed the Ortigas streets into a living classroom, encouraging participants to observe firsthand how sidewalks, crossings, and public spaces either empower or exclude people from urban life.

This immersion into the built environment set the stage for a compelling session focused on tactical urbanism—a practice centered on using short-term, low-cost, and scalable interventions to temporarily reclaim portions of the street from vehicular traffic and make them instantly safer for people. Mobility advocates from different corners of Southeast Asia shared a mixed bag of stories, reflecting on the shared trauma of navigating and challenging hostile urban designs primarily geared toward the convenience of cars. In an open and raw exchange, these practitioners mapped out systemic roadblocks, celebrated small but hard-won victories, and harvested critical insights from grassroots interventions that actually worked to reshape local mindsets and streetscapes.

There was a deeper behavioral lesson beneath these activities: sustainable mobility succeeds not through penalties or negative reinforcement, but through positive stimuli and positive competition. People rarely change long-term behavior because they are shamed or forced into it. But give commuters reliable sidewalks, protected bike infrastructure, affordable transit, and dignified public spaces, and behavior shifts organically. When cities see neighboring governments successfully redesigning streets around people rather than cars, ambition becomes contagious.

This momentum carried directly into the placemaking workshop, where leaders across the region exchanged stories on locally led initiatives, highlighting how communities and local governments can reclaim public spaces to make them safer and more vibrant. The exchange culminated in a transition from theory to practice. Participants visited Antipolo City Hall to learn about the city's sustainable urban mobility plan and active mobility initiatives, taking a hands-on learning tour of Cuatro Cantos and Olalia Street. The afternoon featured a practical placemaking activity and a solidarity dinner with local officials, before concluding with a closed-door coaching session and a pitching activity for individual city plans.

If the Asia Pacific Transport Forum represented the macro-theory of sustainable transport, then #MoveTogether was the point where those theories touched asphalt, sweat, and lived reality. One spoke in the language of regional frameworks, investment pipelines, and institutional strategy; the other spoke through commuters, communities, and the daily choreography of surviving the city.

The truth is that transformation demands both. But while necessity may spark invention, the transport crisis will only be solved through sustained, collective innovation grounded in collaboration between governments, civil society, planners, and the people who navigate these systems every day. Transport solutions cannot remain sealed inside conference halls or buried in policy papers. They must survive contact with the street—where dignity, accessibility, safety, and human connection are not abstract ideals, but urgent daily needs. And in Metro Manila, where every commute becomes a quiet negotiation with exhaustion and inequality, the urgency for that transformation could not be clearer.