With 1.2 million euros funding from the German Federal Ministry of Environment (BMU) through the TRANSfer project, our implementing partner GIZ is supporting the Philippines’ Department of Transportation in developing a National Urban Mobility Programme (NUMP), also locally named as the Philippine Urban Mobility Programme (PUMP).

Objectives

The main purpose of the Philippines NUMP is to:

• Offer cities a general enabling framework for Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMP) elaboration;
• Identify measures to support improvements in active transport and urban freight.

More precisely, the Philippines NUMP comprises social, environmental and economic objectives :

• Social objective: ‘A people-first approach that ensures inclusive, comfortable, safe and dignified access to public services’;
• Environmental objective: ‘An urban transport system which reduces its negative impacts imposed on the environment and on public health towards healthy cities’;
• Economic objective: ‘Efficient, affordable and economically sustainable transport, which supports economic vitality for the individual and for the city’.

The Philippine NUMP promotes the reduction of emissions through changes in active transport, public transport, urban freight, travel demand management, and transit oriented development. It builds on the support given to the Jeepney Modernization Program, which promotes the introduction of safer and more environmentally friendly vehicles and the rationalization of services to consolidate franchises, improve operations, and avoid on-street competition.

As the PUMP is being put into action, current activities focus on the collection of sustainable urban mobility data and on service contracts for road-based public transport.

Expected results

The NUMP has identified and calculated the cost for a number of measures ranging from developing a national walking and cycling policy to modernizing jeepneys in the country. The NUMP is expected to leverage over a billion euros from public and private sectors in investments for vehicle modernisation.

The Philippine Urban Mobility Program will potentially reduce GHG emissions by a total of 15.01–27.13 MtCO2e over 10 years, or a decrease of 5.6–10.1% from BAU. TRANSfer project will be in the Philippines until December 2021. It is expected that the upcoming IKI-funded regional project Urban Act will build on the PUMP framework and outputs.

Achievements

Since year-2017, when the NUMP started, the programme has completed some outputs as:

• EDSA-Bus Case Study: Operations and Business Model (2018-available here)
• Reforming the (semi-)informal minibus system in the Philippines (2019-available here)
• Philippine Urban Mobility Programme Concept Document (2019-available here)

Read more about our activities in the Philippines here.