Baguio is a landlocked highly urbanized city which was founded in the early 1900’s. It was designed by the American Architect Daniel Burnham. It has a land area of 57.51 square kilometres and a population of 366,358 from the 2020 census.

Baguio City is a tourist destination due to its weather, which is usually 2 degrees cooler than the rest of the Philippines. It relies on assets including its indigenous culture, colonial heritage, and environment. It is one of two urban designed cities in the country following the design ideals of a City Beautiful thus, it abounds with parks and open spaces, surrounded by mountains landscapes. The city, considering it is small, was designed as a walking city.

Travel  around the city had always been vehicles powered by fossil fuel. Fortunately, with the introduction of micro-mobility and alternative modes of mobility, citizens will be able to overcome the current challenges of congestion and the ensuing carbon emissions.

The project has one ultimate aim: to reduce the dependency on private vehicles and provide alternative forms of mobility that are good for the health of the people and their environment.

One of the City’s initiatives today is to build micro-mobility infrastructures to help citizens move seamlessly, faster, safer, more economical and environment friendly.

A mock-up of the micro-mobility infrastructures was installed at Session Road, the City’s main thoroughfare. This was used to gauge public opinion and gather feedback in order to improve and localize the designs.

Since these are fairly new to Baguio City’s locality, IECs are being rolled out through its social media and networking sites for the public’s convenience.

Public consultations are also being conducted with stakeholders in order to gauge the acceptability of the project and gather information on how to improve the design.

The Local Government will still develop an M&E tool for this programme, but it already incorporates yearly investments for this program in order to increase the density of micro-mobility infrastructure all over the city. It is expected that this program shall be implemented yearly on a long-term outlook.

Finance

Budget allocation for the project comes from both national and local government agencies. To date, an  aggregate amount of USD1,000,000 had been allocated to the initiative.

 Partners:

Engineering Office

City Buildings and Architecture Office

City Environment and Parks Management Office,

Department of Public Works & Highways from LGU Baguio City

Baguio citizens private sector

Private Sector

From the installation of the mock-up and Information & education campaigns, a lot of people, both residents and tourists alike, voiced their support for the Green Walks Initiative. Along with the #BreatheBaguio city branding, the locality has begun to embrace the transition to a micro-mobility city.

The Micro-Baguio branding also includes PWD (persons with disabilities) and GAD friendly facilities, with the introduction of tactiles, ramps, and street furniture.

The conversion of grey infrastructure into green living streets and shared lanes also allow for equal enjoyment for the public. *Gray infrastructure refers to structures such as dams, seawalls, roads, pipes or water treatment plants (conservation.org)

As the city has breached its carrying capacity especially on road areas, traffic congestion, gridlocks, and “carmaggedon” are becoming a usual occurrence.

The replication of the Micro-Baguio and the green walks initiative is very possible both on the local or national scale.

In fact, cities all over the world who turned to micro-mobility during the pandemic served as the inspiration for this program. Localization of the concepts were implemented in order that it is acceptable according to the experience and aspirations of the people.

Scaling up the program to become a city-wide initiative is the long-term expectation. Given the relatively small size and the highly urbanized character of the city, conversion to low carbon options would highly impact the current carbon emission levels.

The key learning from this program is that since the infrastructure is built for people, their inputs during stakeholder engagements are of prime importance.