Can the Philippines become a developed country

• keep growing its economy.
• get the Islamist insurgency under control and defeated.
• solve its traffic problem.

The last is the hardest. I’ve the long term solution.

First, why doesn’t Grab work everywhere? Remove the regulatory barriers.

Second, while ride sharing helps, for a country of the density of the Philippines, mass transit rail is the only solution.

However bringing mass transit rail directly to the cores of the cities like Manila is not practical.

Instead, for now, take advantage of the growing population, and introduce mass transit rail with every development in the suburbs. Eventually there will be concentric rings of rail around each city, which will reduce the surface traffic in the cores because if it takes 50 times longer to move along the radius as as circumference, people will choose the circumference even if the distance is 6.28 times longer (circumference = 2 * radius * pi).

Eventually people will abandon the cores, and this will be an opportunity for development as the real estate prices will plummet. Then it will be possible to add spokes from the outer rings simply by demolishing abandoned buildings. Land can be reclaimed for parks, or for precision urban planning, making sure this time to reserve vast territory for rail. Perhaps even building a new above ground foundation across the entire core similar to what we see in parts of some cities in the USA (e.g. the lower Wacker in Chicago).

This will allow metropolises to stop expanding and end urban sprawl. With the abandonment of the personal motor vehicle in the cities, voters will demand rail between the cities, and the Philippines will become the most advanced civilization on the planet.