Jakarta and Traffic Congestion

First of all, I will assume that you readers are familiar with the traffic condition in Jakarta, the beloved capital city of Indonesia. If you don't, then all the better for you. Believe me, you don't want to feel it firsthand. It's that bad.

The worst part about traffic in Jakarta, is the frequency and severity of congestion. Heavy congestion happens daily, even twice a day. At mornings, when people get to office, and afternoons, when people got out of office. And even outside of those hours, severe congestions happen all the time. Almost anywhere. Even in the toll highways, which are supposedly free of obstacles.

At times, traffic congestion are the aftereffects of an accident, a road renovation, nonfunctional traffic lights. But most of the time, traffic congestion happens because of something simple. Like all congestions, it happened because there is insufficient space to contain the passing mass. In this situation, it means, too few road area for too many vehicles.

It's not that Jakarta has small road. I believe that they got the the widest roads in the nation. It's just that they got too many vehicles on the road. Try seeing the larger streets in Jakarta in peak hours, such as Rasuna Said, or Sudirman. The roads are huge, around four lanes in all. But the volume of car passing through them is even more than that huge capacity could contain. It would probably take an eight-laned road to contain the kind of traffic that passes those roads at peak hours.

Unfortunately, expanding the road would be out of the question. The heaviest load of traffic in Jakarta happens in crowded commercial and business areas, areas that have no more room to spare for significant road expansion. The only solution left, is, naturally, to reduce the number of vehicles traversing the roads. It is what the provincial government has tried to do in the past few years, with no much success.

The majority of vehicles traversing most of Jakarta's crowded roads are private vehicles. It is only logical that these largest portion are the one that is targeted for reduction. To solve this problem, first, we must understand why people in Jakarta use private vehicles int he first place. I'll try to outline several reasons I can think of.

1. Safety

Most people of mid-to-high income in Jakarta are simply afraid to use public transport. The popular belief is that public transport in Jakarta are unsafe, downright dangerous, even. While this is not entirely true, it can't be denied that the number of crimes on public transport in Jakarta is quite high. Thievery, robbery, and coercion happens daily on mikrolet, buses and trains.

This situation must be amended before people of these higher economic class would consider using public transport. If people feel that these public transport are safe, then they'll not be afraid to use it.

2. Unreliability of Public Transport

Most public transport vehicles in Jakarta have a bad habit of stopping wherever they like, for as long as they like. Usually to fill passengers. This action known as "ngetem" is very variable in time. Sometimes it took a mere five minutes before the vehicle is full and the driver decides its time to go. But sometimes it can took almost an hour before the driver decides to move on. Believe me, it happened to me once.

This action is very annoying, especially when one has an appointment to attend. This unreliability is one reason why people are loath to use public transport. With a private vehicle, someone could calculate the time to reach a place quite reliably if he can compensate for traffic jam by going early. When going with public transport, it is harder to compensate and calculate reliably.

Even the transjakarta busway, who doesn't have the "ngetem" practice, is rather unreliable. This is due to the fact that the buses arrive irregularly and the stops are often crowded. This means that sometimes you only wait for a minute to get on a bus, and next time, you'd probably wait half an hour before you finally got on a bus.

To increase reliability, there are several ways. But the most effective one is to provide a new public transport which is reliable and has the ability to carry a lot of people. The obvious candidate is a Subway train, which is unhindered by traffic and fast.

3. Lifestyle

Face it. Going with private vehicle is part of the lifestyle in Jakarta. Some families have one car for each of the family member. Some even more than that. This is made even more so with the cheap bank loan for buying new vehicles. This is one of the hardest to handle. While increasing public services can make people use public transport, it can't change people's lifestyle.

The only suggestion I have to hamper the "One Kid One Car" habit is by increasing taxes for new vehicles, but I doubt that wouldn't work effectively. Not with the government officials still using cars to go anywhere.


That's all, I guess. Any other reasons that i haven't mentioned? Any comments?