A trial and error job

A trial and error job

Sometimes Jakarta, the overcrowded national capital of 10
million people, becomes a laboratory where trial and error
experiments are conducted, a consequence of the poor planning
that goes into the Herculean task of solving the city's problems.
The city authorities have now come up with a fresh plan for
reducing the burden that endless traffic congestion imposes on
the people. Early this week, the City Council approved an
allocation of Rp 54 billion (US$5.4 million) from the 2002 city
budget for a busway project connecting Blok M in South Jakarta
with downtown Kota in the west. Deputy chairman of the council's
Commission D for development affairs, Ali Imran Husein, claimed
that the project would improve public transportation in Jakarta.

The core of the problem is that there are simply too many cars
in the city, which has only 6,500 kilometers of road. Another
scary statistic is that the number of vehicles increases by 18
percent every year while the road network grows by only four
percent. The abundance of vehicles means that traffic jams grow
worse and worse every day. This situation has seen vehicles move
more and more slowly from year to year, reducing the number of
bus trips. This also causes the condition of the city's cars to
deteriorate more rapidly while making operational costs higher
and profits lower. The poor condition of the buses and the inept
service offered by their drivers have convinced many people of
the need to own their own car. This will in turn worsen the
already choking traffic jams, which some say are among the worst
in the world.

As part of the project, which is due to start in October of
this year, the authorities plan to cut down hundreds of trees
along the Blok M-Kota route, especially on Jl. Sisingamangaraja,
Jl. Jendral Sudirman and Jl. MH. Thamrin, in order to make way
for the development of bus shelters and other facilities for the
new transportation system. According to the city's plan, buses
will ply new routes to be established in the roads' center lanes,
which will be dotted with new bus stops. Passengers alighting
from the buses will be able to cross the road using pedestrian
bridges. How commuters are meant to get to Blok M, for example,
to catch a bus, is another question. They are not supposed to
drive their own cars there because of a lack of parking spaces.

Despite these problems, many people in both the City Council
and City Hall are said to be very proud of the "new masterpiece".
But it was heartening to hear that a number of councillors have
expressed concerns that the project, designed by transportation
experts from the Yogyakarta-based Gadjah Mada University, could
fail.

Outside the corridors of power many others have predicted that
the project will cause more traffic jams and further
environmental damage. The first casualties of the project will
be, of course, private cars. And the congestion will remain. So
where is the wisdom?

And the construction of more pedestrian bridges? Everyone
knows that Jakartans are very reluctant to use these facilities,
and will only do so if forced. They prefer to cross the busy and
dangerous roads. We would envisage that the new bridges along the
busway will serve partly as decoration. Unlike Singaporeans or
Malaysians, it will take at least two more generations before our
nation makes its people respect the rules. Building iron fences
in the middle of the road will serve no purpose, because
pedestrians have a particular talent for tearing them down.

The debate reminds us that Jakarta's real problem is its
status as an overpopulated metropolis full of poor people with
low levels of discipline. There are also too many rotten city
buses and private cars. And arrogant land transportation
officials. In most cases, the officials have been too
supercilious to retreat from the failures of their trial and
error experiments. The three-in-one traffic system along Jl.
Jendral Sudirman -- introduced many years ago -- has long been a
shameful exercise, in which poor young boys join others in
flagrantly flouting the rules. This disgrace has lately been
combined with the failure of the newly-introduced one-way traffic
system from Jl. Sultan Iskandar Muda and Jl. Bintaro Jaya in
South Jakarta, which has almost totally failed. All that remains
there now is the indifference of its architect.

Returning to the new plan to ease congestion along the city's
main north-south thoroughfare, we regret to say that it looks
like an example of development through cannibalism. Overhauling
and reconstructing the expensive thoroughfares, built at the cost
of billion of rupiahs, and cutting down trees that were planted
"with blood and sweat", even though the benefits remain
questionable, is a show of recklessness.

And the planned procurement of some 50 air-conditioned buses,
the operation of which will be later auctioned off to private
concerns, reeks of corruption, collusion and nepotism and will
surely provoke public suspicions, in the absence of effective
supervision in the bureaucracy.
So, it would be wise for the city authorities to abort the plan
because it will only benefit a few people to the cost of many.