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Fundamental questions led wide discussions about the adequacy of the national roads and the funds to build and sufficiently maintain them through the years.

Are our existing national road networks adequate for the country’s expanding needs for national development and progress? Or do we need to add more and better national road infrastructure to the entire network? Where will the funds for these major national investments come from? Can government continue to be the main source for these investments in the face of many competing national needs? These and other issues came into sharper focus as government planners and other sectors sought to consider the country’s road situation from a wider and more comprehensive perspective in the 1990s.

The DPWH, the World Bank, the US A.I.D. contributed to the wide discussions that ensued during the late 1990s. DPWH, with funding assistance from the World Bank, produced Better Roads Philippines in 1998 while New Zealand, with its extensive experience in road management efforts, commissioned the writing of Philippine Road Management Reform Project at about the same period. A consultancy group headed by former Prime Minister Cesar E.A. Virata was asked by U.S. A.I.D. to study and make recommendations on the same general topic. They also came up with the need for a National Road Authority. Seminars and workshops involving the private and public sector discussed the recommendations drawn up and the central findings of the different studies. One workshop in Tagaytay in 1997 arrived at two main reforms needed in road management: (1) involvement of road users in the management of roads, and in the administration of a road fund contributed and paid by road users; and (2) commercialization of a road system, with roads viewed and managed like a business rather than a social service.