City extends, expands three-in-one traffic policy

Bambang Nurbianto, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Objections from motorists to the Jakarta Administration's plan to extend the three-in-one traffic policy apparently did not deter the bureaucrats from continuing their plan and even expanding it.

City secretary for development affairs Irzal Djamal, who is also head of the busway project team, told The Jakarta Post on Wednesday that the policy would be enforced to support the launching of 60 buses in the Bus Rapid Transit or busway project in January.

The three-in-one policy requires that vehicles must have at least three passengers while driving along Jl. Jend. Sudirman and Jl. M.H. Thamrin from 6:30 a.m. to 10 a.m., Monday to Friday.

The new policy will be enforced all along the 12.9-kilometer busway corridor from Blok M in South Jakarta to Kota in West Jakarta from 6:30 a.m. to 10 a.m. and also from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Irzal said that he was preparing a gubernatorial decree, which would become the legal basis for the extended policy.

Since being launched in 1993, the policy failed to reduce congestion along the main thoroughfares as motorists simply began hiring joki (people posing as passengers for hundreds meters as they passed the single checkpoint) for a small fee.

Irzal said that motorists would not be able to hire joki as the three-in-one policy would be effective for the length of the roads as opposed to just at the entrances as it is now. He estimated that the new policy could reduce the number of private cars along the well-traveled roads by up to 30 percent.

Separately, Director-General of Land Transportation at the Ministry of Communications, Iskandar Abubakar, still estimated that severe congestion would occur along the roads from Blok M to Kota once the busway became operational.

"The severe congestion is unavoidable as one lane of the road will be used for the busway. Many private car owners are still using their vehicles and still reluctant to take buses, even the new busway," he told the Post after speaking at a seminar on the Jakarta macro-transportation model.

Iskandar said that the busway would only be effective if private car users opted for the busway when commuting.

Irzal admitted that the busway system was not yet ready to transport all 60,000 commuters along the Blok M-Kota route as its 60 buses could only accommodate some 20,000 commuters per day.

Tickets for the busway have been ordered from Colombia which has been successful in implementing a similar busway in its capital Bogota.

"The tickets will be ready in January when the busway is ready. The ticket fee is not fixed yet but we estimate it should cost Rp 2,500 (29 U.S. cents) per trip," he said. The ticket is cheaper than other air-conditioned buses, which are currently Rp 3,500.

Irzal also mentioned two other alternatives that would be applied if the busway operation was not effective enough to reduce the traffic.

The first possibility is the alternate license plate program, which only allows vehicles with certain plate numbers to operate on certain days.

For example, cars with plate numbers ending with 1 or 2 are allowed to operate on the designated roads on Mondays.

The second alternative is implementing electronic road pricing on certain roads near the busway corridors.

Irzal said that his team was still studying this system, saying that such a system had worked well in Singapore and could also be applied in Jakarta.