What It Means
- The Manila truck ban exemption process has drawn DILG and ARTA scrutiny for years, and it was already ruled illegal before Executive Order 41 existed.
- The Manila Traffic and Parking Bureau was named directly by ARTA in 2021 for collecting fees through a travel permit system that DILG Memorandum Circular 2018-133 had already prohibited.
- Executive Order 41 added national pressure in 2023, but operators say the Manila truck ban exemption changed shape instead of stopping, moving from a documented permit into an undocumented, contact based arrangement.
- Independent haulers and small fleet operators carry the cost, paying per truck through a channel that leaves no receipt and no formal recourse.
- Bacoor and Tarlac show the same underlying practice surviving elsewhere, in more visible but still unresolved forms.
The Manila truck ban exemption was never a gray area. The Department of the Interior and Local Government has called fees like this illegal since 2006, and the Anti-Red Tape Authority formally warned Manila’s own mayor about it in 2021, naming the Manila Traffic and Parking Bureau directly. That warning did not end the practice. Executive Order 41 added fresh national pressure in 2023. Operators who move trucks through the city say what changed afterward was not whether the Manila truck ban exemption fee exists, but how visible it is.
The Manila Truck Ban Exemption Was Ruled Illegal Before EO 41 Existed
DILG has treated pass-through fees on goods transport as illegal since 2006. The department has repeated that position at least eight times through separate memorandum circulars, the most recent being MC 2018-133, issued in August 2018. That circular directs LGUs to stop enforcing any ordinance that levies fees on the transport of goods and merchandise, and it draws no distinction between national and local roads. The prohibition is not conditional on who built or funds the road. It is a flat rule, and it predates EO 41 by five years.
In March 2021, ARTA tested that rule directly against Manila. Deputy director general Ernesto Perez wrote to then Mayor Francisco Domagoso stating that the city’s practice of collecting fees through the issuance of a travel permit contradicted MC 2018-133. The letter named the Manila Traffic and Parking Bureau as the office administering the fee, and gave the city’s own office a chance to resolve the matter internally before ARTA referred it further to DILG.
This is the detail that separates the Manila truck ban exemption from a simple jurisdictional ambiguity. The fee was not an untested legal theory when EO 41 arrived two and a half years later. It had already been formally identified, in writing, to the mayor’s own office, as a violation of a standing national circular. Whatever legal argument a city might construct around local road ownership or fiscal autonomy, none of it was ever raised as a defense here. The office was simply told to stop, and the letter named the exact mechanism doing the collecting.
EO 41 Added Pressure. The Fee Adapted Instead of Stopping.
Executive Order 41, signed September 25, 2023, prohibited LGUs from collecting pass-through fees on national roads outright and strongly urged suspension of similar fees, including Mayor’s Permit fees and entry fees, on local roads. Joint Administrative Order 24-01, issued in January 2024, set out implementing guidelines and gave DILG thirty days to collect and review existing LGU ordinances. As of mid 2024, roughly 40 of the country’s more than 1,300 LGUs had suspended collection, according to the government’s own compliance reporting. That is a thin clearing rate for an order carrying presidential weight, a joint implementing order, and nearly two decades of prior DILG warnings behind it.
Enforcement has picked up since, at least on paper. In February 2026, ARTA disclosed it had filed complaints against LGUs before the Ombudsman over related violations, including a grave misconduct case against a Bulacan mayor tied directly to EO 41 noncompliance, with a request for preventive suspension pending investigation. The agency said more filings were expected following a round of inspections. None of that activity has surfaced against Manila by name. What has continued, according to operators who move trucks through the city, is the underlying Manila truck ban exemption fee itself, just not in the form ARTA already flagged once.
The Documented Permit Became an Undocumented Arrangement
The version of the Manila truck ban exemption that ARTA flagged in 2021 ran through a formal channel. A travel permit was issued. There was a process with a paper trail, questionable as its legal basis was. What operators describe encountering more recently is different in structure, not just in amount. Exemptions for trucks classified as ten wheelers and above reportedly move through an individual contact inside MTPB, processed against a personal list rather than an office ledger, with a fee of ₱1,600 per truck changing hands and no receipt issued at any point in the transaction.
That distinction matters more than the peso figure attached to it, and it is the core of why the Manila truck ban exemption is now harder to challenge than it was in 2021.
A travel permit, illegal as its underlying basis was, still generates a record that DILG’s ordinance review or ARTA’s compliance monitoring could theoretically trace back to an office and a policy.
A cash arrangement tied to one individual and a private list generates nothing of the kind. There is no document for DILG to request under its own review authority, no permit for ARTA to reference in a follow up letter, and no line item for the compliance reports EO 41 requires DTI and DILG to jointly submit to the Office of the President.
The exact mechanism that produced ARTA’s 2021 letter, a documented permit tied to a named office, would have nothing to work with today.
The result is a fee that survived two rounds of direct national scrutiny, DILG’s own circular and ARTA’s letter naming the office responsible, not by becoming compliant, but by becoming harder to document than it was when it first got caught.
Manila Is the Sharpest Case, Not the Only One
The same underlying pattern, a fee EO 41 was meant to end that persisted anyway, shows up elsewhere in more visible forms. Bacoor City in Cavite passed Ordinance 428-2025 in March 2025, eighteen months after EO 41 took effect, formally amending its truck ban exemption fee schedule and routing the proceeds into a dedicated Traffic Management Department account. Tarlac City’s Executive Order 26, series of 2025, imposes a truck ban across specific streets while routing exemptions through discretionary special permits issued directly by the mayor’s office, with no published fee schedule attached to the order.
Both cases involve LGUs continuing to monetize truck ban exemptions well after EO 41 took effect, and both do it through some form of official process, an ordinance in Bacoor’s case, a mayoral permit in Tarlac’s. Whatever the merits of either approach, a paper trail exists in both. The Manila truck ban exemption, as described by operators currently navigating it, has neither an ordinance nor a permit. It has the fee without any of the documentation that even a weak legal theory would require to exist on record.
The pattern holds even when the comparison runs the other way. A city that wanted to defend a truck ban exemption fee on even a thin legal ground would keep some form of ordinance or permit on file, if only to have something to point to if challenged.
The Manila truck ban exemption has no such document to produce. Metro Manila’s own traffic apparatus has been down this road before. In 2016, the MMDA suspended all truck ban exemption passes indefinitely, citing unspecified problems with how the system was being administered, before eventually reinstating a version of it.
That suspension is itself proof the exemption pass mechanism was, at minimum, formal enough to be audited and shut down by memo. What operators describe today does not meet that bar. A system with no ordinance, no ledger, and no named office cannot be suspended the way the 2016 pass system was, because there is nothing on record to suspend.
The Fee Outran the System Built to Catch It
Cross jurisdiction haulers and small fleet operators without the standing to negotiate a formal exemption are the ones absorbing the current version of this arrangement. They pay per truck, through a contact rather than an office, with no receipt tying the payment to any authority that could be challenged, refunded, or held accountable if the terms change without notice. DILG’s own review process, built to catch fees exactly like this, has no ordinance to request and no travel permit to trace back to MTPB. The compliance architecture that produced a formal warning letter in 2021 is still in place today. It simply has nothing left in front of it to find.
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