Cebu Island continues to grow year by year.
As the second largest city in the Philippines, more and more high-rise buildings are being built, but the infrastructure is lagging behind to keep up.
Traffic congestion is especially severe in the mornings and evenings.
Moreover, there are almost no traffic lights and the traffic manners are not flattering.
I would never want to drive a car in Cebu City.
If you are staying at a hotel in Cebu City and want to go to the airport, it is no problem if it is early in the morning because the roads are empty, but if it is any other time of the day, the time until you arrive is unpredictable.
The bottleneck is that there are only two bridges that cross to Mactan Island, where the airport is located.
When I went to Cebu for the first time, there was only one.
The second bridge was opened in 1999 with a loan from JICA (Japan International Cooperation Agency), which seems to have eased the situation a little, but the subsequent increase in population, private cars, and tourists has greatly increased the amount of traffic, resulting in frequent congestion.
Therefore, it was decided to build two new bridges, one on Cebu Island and the other on Mactan Island.
Construction has already begun on a third bridge that will connect Cordova on Mactan Island to Cebu South Coastal Road, south of the Port of Cebu.
This bridge is being built by an Indonesian company, and construction is well underway.
Incidentally, the Cebu South Coastal Road was also built with a loan from JICA.
The fourth bridge, for which a formal contract with JICA was signed last June, will be built just north of the second bridge.
This bridge is a direct route from Mactan Airport to Cebu Island, and there will also be a new coastal road on the Cebu side of the bridge that connects directly to Mandaue Road.
If you settle in Pinamagajan, the closest distance to the airport would be through the third bridge, but it depends on the condition of the connecting road from the bridge on the Mactan Island side to the airport.
The fourth bridge seems to have a good connection with the highway that will be built uptown in Cebu City, so although it will be a bit of a detour, we may be able to arrive there earlier in time than using the third bridge.
In any case, I welcome the improvement of the infrastructure.
At the same time, I hope that the electricity and communication infrastructures will be improved more and more.
It's hard to tell which one is which when there are so many lines. I always wonder how hard it must be for the people who work on the power lines and communications.
