Every weekday, I pass by the Manila-Cavite Coastal Road on my way to and from the office and there are times when the traffic on the way home gets really bad. The problem is that Coastal Road is the only viable highway for those people living in Cavite and working in Metro Manila to go back home. And since the end of the Coastal Road goes towards the traffic-choked Aguinaldo Highway, traffic may go all the way back to the tollbooth plaza if there is too much vehicular traffic.

There are two infrastructure projects that were aimed to alleviate traffic in this area. One is the planned southern extension of LRT-1 from Baclaran to Cavite, but this was shelved (but hopefully only temporarily). The other, and this is already in full swing, is the extension of Coastal Road, also known as the Radial Road 1 (R-1).

What I’ll be featuring now is the Zapote Interchange, which connects Coastal Road to the Alabang-Zapote Road via the Coastal Line Road and the Alabang-Zapote Centennial Flyover. This interchange is currently under construction, but work seems to have halted for some reason. And because of the construction, the Aguinaldo Monument in this area, which I featured before, had been dismantled early last year. (I have no idea where the statue went.)

Anyway, based on the shape of the reclaimed area and the layout of the unfinished flyover, it seems that they plan that the Coastal Road will be rerouted as a straight route to the west, under the flyover, instead of curving south as it does now. Motorists wanting to go to Bacoor or Las Piñas would have to leave the expressway via planned grade-separated exits.

You can actually follow the route of the R-1 extension westwards. It goes over a causeway in Bacoor Bay before heading back to land just before the Island Cove Resort. A short distance to the southwest is more reclamation along the Kawit coastline and what appears to be another tollbooth plaza.

Download KML file (for Google Earth)