Filling a need

As the millions of Jakartans who cannot afford the luxury of owning a car or motorbike well know, much is left to be desired about this city's public transportation system. Except for the few RMB air conditioned buses which are operated by the PPD city transit company, city buses and minibuses are overcrowded to the point that they endanger their passengers and other road users alike. In addition, they ply only the main roads and offer irregular and singularly bad service.

Although they are uncomfortable and noisy and despite the fact that they pollute the air with their thick, biting exhaust gases, the small three-wheeled scooter taxis known as bajaj are useful for short trips. Their range of operation, however, is limited by law and their numbers are far from adequate. Taxis are available, of course, and some of them are considered quite good, but for hundreds of thousands of Jakartans they are not affordable. Besides that, many taxi drivers refuse to carry passengers on short hauls, although this is supposed to be against their company's rules.

It was because of all this that the modest pedicab, the bicycle taxi known as becak, enjoyed such a wide popularity during the many years that it was allowed to operate in this city. Those vehicles were completely noiseless and non-polluting and they could reach every corner of any neighborhood without difficulty. They were the favored means of short-haul transportation for millions of Jakartans.

Then, in 1989, the becak were banned. City officials ruled that it was "inhumane" to allow a person to pedal another one to his or her destination, and thus the pedicab was banned. Critics of the ban argued that it was even more inhumane to deprive thousands of people of their honest earning and perhaps force them to resort to crime in order to survive. Whatever the truth, the officials had their way and Jakarta has been without becak for more than five years.

No one knows whether, or to what extent, the authorities have in the meantime been able to fulfill their promise to find other means of employment for the jobless pedicab drivers. What is unmistakable is that the city authorities have not made good their promise to the Jakarta citizenry to find another adequate means of transportation to replace the becak. For five years the small but pressing void in the city's public transportation system was left unattended to.

Under the circumstances one should not be at all surprised that a number of enterprising young men with motorbikes have taken the initiative to fill that void by making good use of their vehicles and transporting passengers for a fee. As far as the public is concerned, a real need is thus satisfied. And a source of extra income is secured for the owners/drivers of the motorbikes. And because all of this is in accordance with the universally recognized law of supply and demand, it is once again not surprising that those motorcycle-taxis, which are known as ojek, have since considerably increased in number.

Now comes the news that the ojek are to be banned on the grounds that they are "not provided for in the law". Legal and humanitarian arguments aside, the question is, what will such a ban actually achieve? We believe that unless there is a clear and feasible concept that accommodates all the existing needs, to ban the ojek at this stage will simply be to repeat the becak experience. The need for short-distance transportation will remain and, in time, some new means, with its own ensuing problems, will emerge.