“Skyway to Batasan is more than a traffic solution. It reflects a shift in how we now think about mobility”
THERE are roads that merely carry vehicles—and there are roads that quietly carry the weight of a country’s aspirations.
The planned Skyway extension to Batasan is one of those roads.
More formally known as Skyway Stage 4, or the Southeast Metro Manila Expressway, the project is a 32.7-kilometer elevated toll road designed to connect Taguig, particularly the Arca South area, all the way to Batasan Road in Quezon City.
On paper, it is infrastructure. In daily life, it is time regained.
Once completed, travel that now takes close to two hours—sometimes longer during peak congestion—could be reduced to under 30 minutes.
By running largely along the old C-6 corridor, Skyway Stage 4 links SLEX and Skyway Stage 2 directly to the Batasan Complex, providing a long-overdue alternative to the overburdened EDSA and C-5.
For thousands of motorists moving daily between Southern Metro Manila, Rizal, and Quezon City, this road is not a luxury—it is relief.
But Skyway to Batasan is more than a traffic solution. It reflects a shift in how we now think about mobility.
For decades, Metro Manila has lived with a cruel paradox: opportunity clustered in the capital, but movement strangled by congestion.
We learned to measure our days not by hours worked, but by hours lost.
In that sense, every kilometer of elevated road is also a reclamation of dignity—time returned to families, productivity, and rest.
This thinking underpins the infrastructure push of San Miguel Corporation led by Chairman and CEO Ramon S. Ang who has often spoken with disarming directness about nation-building. “If we wait for the perfect time, nothing will ever get built,” he has said—an unromantic line that nonetheless explains why projects long stuck in PowerPoint slides are now rising in steel and concrete.
Ang has also been candid about the role of private enterprise in a developing country.
“Government cannot do everything alone,” he has noted.
“If we can help build what the country needs, we should.” It is a philosophy that treats infrastructure not as entitlement, but as responsibility.
The Skyway system has already reshaped north–south movement across the metropolis, stitching together regions once thought impossibly distant. Extending that logic eastward toward Batasan is both practical and symbolic.
Practical, because it opens access to fast-growing residential and institutional corridors. Symbolic, because Batasan is not just a destination—it is where laws are debated, futures argued over, and national direction contested.
The road leading there should reflect urgency, efficiency, and foresight.
And Skyway Stage 4 does not stand alone.
It belongs to a family of projects that signal a move away from piecemeal fixes toward systems thinking.
The rehabilitation of NAIA seeks to untangle decades of neglect and restore the airport as a gateway worthy of a growing economy.
The New Manila International Airport in Bulacan imagines aviation not as congestion, but as connection—linking regions, industries, and global opportunity.
Expressways stretching north and south compress geography itself, turning once-distant provinces into active partners in growth.
Even flood control—long treated as an afterthought—has been pulled into the infrastructure conversation.
River dredging, waterway clearing, and resilience-driven design reflect another blunt truth Ang has pointed out: “If you don’t fix flooding, everything else fails.” Roads that flood are roads that fail. Cities that sink cannot move forward.
Critics will—and should—ask hard questions. About transparency.
About safeguards. About equity. Mega projects deserve mega scrutiny. But skepticism should not blind us to momentum.
As Ang himself has warned, “Doing nothing also has a cost—and Filipinos pay for it every day in traffic, delays, and lost opportunities.”
Infrastructure, after all, is frozen policy.
It reveals what a nation believes about its future.
When we build roads that connect rather than divide, airports that invite rather than frustrate, and systems that prepare rather than react, we are making a quiet but consequential statement: that the Filipino tomorrow is worth planning for today.
And sometimes, the clearest sign that a country is finally moving forward is when its roads do, too.
(The writer, president/chief executive officer of Media Touchstone Ventures, Inc. and president/executive director of the Million Trees Foundation Inc., a non-government outfit advocating tree-planting and environmental protection, is the official biographer of President Fidel V. Ramos.)
