Big infrastructure projects take a long time everywhere. There are usually multiple steps in the process for stakeholder consultation, financial identification and preparations, environmental concerns. Often all the planning is done and someone, usually a professional planner, says these plans were made on assumptions and predictions from several years ago, we should redo these plans and make sure that the inputs are still valid. Hire my firm to do this planning, wash rinse and repeat several times. Because of the huge financial value of the construction contracts, these get a lot of scrutiny and can take a long time to tender, bid and award. If there are outside funding sources like the ADB or similar entity the contract award process can be extended as not only does the Philippine government process have to be followed, but the lending agency’s processes need to be followed as well.
Some aspects of Philippine life then enter into this. Politicians like to announce a project just before an election and get the work started only to not be able to fund once they are in office, at least not until just before the next election. This happens everywhere to some extent but seams more prevalent in the Philippines.
There also appears to be more people with inputs than elsewhere, these people all have some concern and it needs to be addressed before the work can go on. They appear at just about any time and can hold a project. What is needed is a period of public consultation that once over is fixed so as soon as someone thinks up an objection the progress is not halted.
There does not appear to be the same construction work ethic here as I have observed elsewhere. On many projects the workers are come from away, want to get the job done as fast as possible and then go home. Here with all local labour, the workers want more time off, they go home at night, spend it with their families rather than work long hours or night shifts as much. I think that this is more a local labour factor than a Philippine factor, most of my construction experience involved come from away labour living in camps and temporary accommodations. Perhaps there are some local labour laws that impact this but it is unusual to see night Sunday or holiday work here. It is not unusual to see jobs abandoned for several months either. That usually indicates a financial reason, funds not available to continue.
In Manila especially things like the Skyway systems extensions, the MRT extensions take a lot longer because of all the traffic congestion. You need to re-route all traffic around a project, you need to get your material supplied through all the congestion etc so the work can take a lot longer.
Construction techniques do not appear to be significantly different here, in fact on many large sites I have seen I have seen some pretty modern methods. However on small projects they do not use the same levels of sophistication as do the larger ones. You see hand batch mix concrete on small jobs where the big ones all use ready mix or have a site plant. That happens everywhere as economics plays a large part in how the work gets done but just seams a bigger difference here on large vs small projects.
Look up the Big Dig in Boston to see how long a major infrastructure work can take. People started and ended careers only working on some aspect of that one. Planning started in the 1930, some construction was done in the 50’s and later. The official start of planning for it a stand alone project was in 1982, construction was started in 1991 and ended in 2007.
I am not convinced that projects here, especially the mega ones, take all that much longer than they do elsewhere all things considered.
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