Busway consortium to be paid by the km
Damar Harsanto, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
The busway consortium -- comprising of three private bus operators and two city-owned transportation firms -- will receive a fee from operating the busway calculated on every kilometer the buses travel, rather than the number of busway passengers.
"Members of the consortium will receive between Rp 7,000 (82 U.S. cents) and Rp 8,000 for every kilometer that each bus travels," said busway management team head Irzal Djamal on Thursday, after a ceremony attended by 2,098 personnel from the busway task force at the National Monument (Monas) Park, Central Jakarta.
The five members of the consortium are private firms Bianglala, Steady Safe, and Pahala Kencana; city-owned bus firm PPD, and transportation firm Ratax. The consortium members were all operators of buses plying similar routes to busway's except Ratax.
Although Governor Sutiyoso modeled much of the busway system on the TransMilenio project in Colombia's capital city Bogota, the initiation of the busway here is vastly different.
In Bogota, bus operators bid against one another for involvement in the TransMilenio project. The operators also prepare, operate and maintain the buses and train the bus drivers and crews.
Irzal said that the method of calculation would influence the decision to extend the bus headway. The headway is the period of time between an arriving bus and the next arriving bus, or, an indication of the period of time a passenger must wait for the next bus.
During peak hours, the headway will hover at 90 seconds for each of the 40 operating buses for the busway project.
"If the number of passengers is low and the buses are vacant, we will reduce the number of operating buses and park others at three designated places in Kebon Melati and IRTI parking lot in Monas, both in Central Jakarta, and Lebak Bulus, South Jakarta," Irzal said.
Thus, passengers would wait even longer to board buses during off-peak hours.
Governor Sutiyoso said at the ceremony that the city must carry through with the project because "we have experienced more than 30 years without reliable and comfortable public transportation".
The busway -- that will serve the 12.9-kilometer corridor from Blok M, South Jakarta, to Kota, West Jakarta -- will kick off on Jan. 15, after being delayed three times.
Each passenger must pay Rp 2,500 for a one-way ticket. Prepaid tickets in the form of magnetic cards will be available for frequent users of busway. To reach Blok M or the nearest bus shelter, passengers can take one of 165 feeder buses from 16 locations.
Tickets for the bus feeders for the inner city zone will cost Rp 2,900, while for the outer city zone bus feeder tickets will cost Rp 3,800. Passengers connecting from bus feeders will not have to buy an additional ticket to travel on the busway, but simply exchange their feeder ticket for a busway ticket.