An age-old problem
In an effort to improve the local transportation system, the Jakarta administration had planned to take over state-owned public bus operator PPD. But the plan was canceled this week because the bus company has too many internal problems. If one had time to look into the problems one would find that the company deserves to be included in a "Believe it or Not" corner of a newspaper.
PPD, a well established public bus operator owned by the Ministry of Transportation, has been in the red for the last 16 years due to mismanagement. While also burdened with an oversized workforce of 5,000, it has had to provide public transportation. Last year, PPD suffered a loss of Rp 400 billion (US$44 million) and it is now reliant on government subsidies amounting to Rp 2.3 billion a month to cover its Rp 8 billion monthly expenditure.
The company operates 454 public buses that serve 67 routes in the capital. The fleet consists of 265 regular and express buses and 189 buses that are air-conditioned, while 19 buses are rented out from private operators. Meanwhile, the company has 489 inoperable buses left idle at its 16 bus depots. However extraordinary this may appear, it is the state of Jakarta's public transportation today.
Overcrowded public buses edging their way along jam-packed streets have been part of Jakarta's landscape for the past three decades but no solution has been found to rid the capital of this hopelessly inefficient situation. One would not be exaggerating to say that the local public transportation system is one of the world's worst. And tomorrow does not promise to be any better.
The situation becomes all too obvious if you have to use public transportation. Once you take a city bus here you soon experience a dehumanizing process, where your value is reduced to the Rp 900 (10 U.S. cents) one-way fare you pay for any distance, sitting or standing, wedged in between other sweaty passengers.
Most of the time it is virtually impossible to get a seat because the driver tries to fill the already overcrowded vehicle with even more people. Safety is not guaranteed here and the speed is limited by how crowded the street is at a given time. Some 11,865 public buses are currently in operation, which includes only 1,078 that are fully air-conditioned, serving the city's 10 million population. The buses are part of the 1.9 million vehicles that travel the city's streets every day.
Although there is a desperate need to overcome this situation, in the current economic crisis the city is not in a position to think about modern projects like an efficient, cost-effective public transportation system or a multilevel interchange and underground system because it is finding it difficult enough just subsidizing public bus operators, which are severely short of spare parts.
The only and best solution might be the building of outer-ring roads in order to ease road congestion within the city.