The Road That Floats

The crossing from Liloan, at the southern tip of Cebu, to Sibulan on Negros takes about half an hour. There is no terminal to speak of — a concrete apron, a shed selling tickets, a steel ramp running down into the water. A lorry reverses aboard first, then a jeepney, then a line of motorcycles, then the foot passengers walk up the same ramp and sit on plastic chairs above the engine. Nothing is craned. Nothing is unloaded. The ramp lifts, the barge crosses the Tañon Strait, the ramp comes down on the far side, and the lorry drives off onto the national road as though the water had been a level crossing.

That is the whole idea, and it is national policy. The Philippines is 7,641 islands, by the count the mapping agency revised upwards in 2016, and roughly two thousand of them have people living on them. A country shaped like that has to decide whether the sea is the edge of its road network or a stretch of it with different surfacing. In 2003 it decided, formally and in writing, on the second.

Executive Order 170

The order was signed in January 2003 and it is not, on its face, about ships. It is about ports and fees: it set out how private operators could build and run roll-on/roll-off terminals, and it stripped away the layer of charges that made moving a box across water expensive. What was assembled on top of it was marketed as the Strong Republic Nautical Highway — three corridors, western first, stitching Luzon to the Visayas to Mindanao out of short ferry hops between roads that already existed. The mechanism is worth being precise about, because it is the entire policy. In a conventional port, cargo comes off a truck, is handled, stored and lifted aboard, and the whole sequence runs again in reverse at the other end; each movement has a name and a tariff — arrastre, stevedoring, wharfage — and each is an opportunity for breakage, pilferage and a day of waiting. On a roll-on ferry the cargo never leaves the truck. The operator sells lane metres, the driver keeps the keys, and the handling charges have nothing left to attach themselves to. For a load of mangoes leaving Mindanao that is the difference between a week and a day, and between four intermediaries and none.

Why a ramp and not a crane

The second thing the policy exploited is that a roll-on berth is cheap. It needs a ramp, an apron and enough water under it to float a shallow-draught ferry. It needs no gantry crane, no container yard, no dredged channel, no deep-water approach. A container port is a capital project a province lobbies for over a decade; a roll-on ramp is something a municipality can put up with a bond issue and a contractor. That is why they multiplied into the hundreds, and why the network reached islands that no container line would ever have called at — the economics of serving a place of thirty thousand people finally worked.

It is also why the network is thin exactly where thinness matters. The same low threshold that put a ramp on a small island put it there without a harbourmaster's office, without a working weather station, and often without anyone on the pier whose job is to refuse a sailing. The infrastructure that got built was the part that carries weight. The part that says no is a person, and people cost money every year rather than once.

A roll-on ramp is the cheapest piece of transport infrastructure a poor archipelago can build. Cheapness is the policy, the achievement and the risk, in one object.

The manifest

On the night of 20 December 1987 the passenger ferry Doña Paz, five days short of Christmas and carrying people home for it, collided with the small oil tanker Vector in the Tablas Strait off Mindoro on her run from Tacloban to Manila. The tanker's cargo caught fire and the fire took both ships in minutes. The Doña Paz's manifest listed 1,493 passengers. Nobody has ever established how many people were actually aboard, because tickets were sold without names, children travelled unlisted and the ship was carrying far beyond the number she was certified for; the accepted estimate of the dead runs above four thousand, which makes it the worst peacetime disaster at sea in history. Twenty-four people came out of the water alive.

What that eventually produced is the reason a visitor buying a three-hundred-peso ticket to Siquijor is asked for a passport. Names go on a manifest, the manifest is lodged with the Coast Guard, and boarding closes when the count closes rather than when the boat leaves. It is small, tedious, entirely correct administration, and it exists because for one night in 1987 nobody could say how many people had been on a ship. The fleet itself is a slower problem: a large share of the domestic boats are second-hand Japanese ferries retired from routes around Kyushu and the Inland Sea, which is why the evacuation notices in the stairwells are frequently still in Japanese. The regulator has spent years tightening age and stability limits on them, and the difficulty has never been writing the rule. It is that the rule has to reach several hundred piers that were built precisely because they were cheap to build.

The expensive answer

The alternative to a ramp is a bridge, and the Philippines has been building those too, slowly, where the traffic justifies the cost. San Juanico opened in 1973 and carries the road from Leyte to Samar across 2.16 kilometres of tidal strait; for half a century it was the longest bridge in the country. The Cebu–Cordova Link Expressway took the title in 2022 at 8.9 kilometres. Longer crossings are in the pipeline — Bataan to Cavite across Manila Bay, and a chain from Panay through Guimaras to Negros — at costs measured in tens of billions of pesos and construction periods measured in presidential terms.

A bridge is a ferry you pay for once, and then it works in the dark, in the rain, and at four in the morning when no crew is rostered. That is the argument for it, and the reason it will only ever be made in a handful of places. Everywhere else the sea stays a section of road with a timetable, a fare and a weather condition. Around twenty tropical cyclones enter Philippine waters in an ordinary year, and when a wind signal goes up the Coast Guard suspends sailings by vessel class, small outriggers first, and the piers fill with people sleeping on their luggage until it lifts. Travelling here means accepting that the highway closes. It is still a highway, and until 2003 large parts of it were not one.