Rants... and Lots of it.

Okay... where to start? I got a lot to rant about lately, and surprisingly (or not) most are not about myself.

Let's see. How about we start at... the legendary traffic problem in Jakarta. For those who lived there, you should know what I mean. The whole city streets are overpacked with private vehicles, public transport, and motorcycles. As some 'experts' would say, the solution to these traffic problems are Mass Rapid Transport (MRT). Hell, even a half-decent engineer like myself could figure that out.

Now, let's look at MRT. For now, Jakarta has its commuter train (which is reputedly packed and unsafe, but I leave that for readers to decide. Just try the 6 AM economic-class for a change.) and the new busway.

Suffice to say that the Busway system is... undermanned and underequipped to deal with the number of potential passengers. The newer corridors have far lesser number of vehicles than needed. As such, the arrival rate of the buses are erratic at best. Sometimes it only took 5 minutes, sometimes (more likely) they'd arrive at around 20 minutes interval, and even then, it's likely to be full and could only load only a handful of extra passengers.

Some stated that Jakarta would apply a congestion control zone to regulate the traffic. As a general rule, congestion control is nice, IF, and only IF the public transport is at least halfway decent. Which is, sadly, not the case for Jakarta. When congestion control is applied without decent public transport, people would have to choose between expensive private transport, or unreliable public transport. a choice between bad and worse. And believe me, it's not fun to be presented that kind of choice when you're just trying to make your living.

The obvious answer to transportation problems in a large city is Subway. The subway took virtually no space above ground (where it's tightly packed in large cities), and have a very good ratio of energy per people transported. Unfortunately this approach has severe problems two. One is that it's expensive to build, and expensive to maintain. This is usually not a problem, except that by being a public transport, it should be affordable to the potential passengers. 'Affordable' and 'Expensive' apparently doesn't like each other that much.

Two, is that Jakarta's underground map is sketchy at best. Imagine sewage lines, gas pipes, water pipes, phone lines, fiber optics, and all other goodies crisscrossing under there. And now imagine, how should you put a train tunnel through all that mess. Add to that, the fact that several of the agencies that overlook those mess aren't exactly well-coordinated, and some even, have inaccurate maps. Believe me, it's true. As an example, a friend once complained about an 'official' map of one of the agencies showing noticeable discrepancies of distance and scaling when compared to the field situation. And some, even showing objects that was not there. While some mislabeled an object as another. Fun, eh?

Of course, if one were to think through the problems, they should find some solutions. Ideas such as digging the tunnel deeper than the known pipes, or rerouting intersecting routes, were possibly viable.

Ah well, enough of my rant for now... Perhaps I'll continue later. Perhaps.