Jakarta races against time

Willy Tumewu, Senior Lecturer, Transportation Engineering, Bandung Institute of Technology, Bandung, West Java

Traffic congestion in Jakarta is severe simply because the demand for transportation far exceeds supply. Thus, transportation in Jakarta is costly compared to the services offered, and caters to only the most necessary purposes. Commuters have to leave home early in the morning and return late at night; workday peak periods have been extended and already cover most of the daylight hours; precious time is being wasted during commutes. What can be done? Reduce demand, increase supply, or a combination of both?

The demand for transportation increases with higher economic prosperity. During this economic crisis some 10 million to 15 million trips are being made each day in the capital. To reduce these trips would be detrimental to economic development. Half of these trips are made by public transportation, and this is not a bad statistic.

The supply of transportation in Jakarta is mainly from its road network, with a small contribution from the trains serving Greater Jakarta. How much road space is adequate? At present only some 6 percent of the land area is used for roads, while in major European cities roughly one-fifth of urban areas is used for transportation infrastructure, and twice this in cities in the U.S.

Clearly there is a strong case for increasing the supply of transportation, but this should be done wisely through careful planning of the land use-transportation system. Public transportation should be made the backbone of the system. Urban revitalization should be linked to mass-transportation development. For instance, the presently proposed busway system would merely optimize available roadspace, whereas a subway or a triple-decker system would increase transportation supply.

We do not have to reinvent the wheel. A lot can be learned from past experience. European cities were rebuilt after World War II with an eye toward U.S. cities, which were already at a more advanced stage. The development of eastern Berlin was a second opportunity for German planners to test their theories.

In Asia we can look at what is happening in Kuala Lumpur, Manila, Bangkok, Taipei, Seoul, Shanghai and Shenzen. But time is not our side. The Jakarta intraurban toll road system was started a quarter century ago and part of the outer-ringroad is still being tendered out. And in the meantime, demand for transportation has outgrown the additional supply being provided.

The 1977 Indonesian Highway Capacity Manual states, among other things, that an efficient road network is one without traffic congestion, perhaps as in Singapore. Congestion increases the cost of transportation dramatically through an increase in travel time, vehicle operating costs and air and noise pollution.

Estimates of congestion costs in Jakarta range from billions to trillions of rupiah per year, and these costs have to be borne by the economy as a whole. A policy on land use-transportation systems for major urban centers is badly needed.

If by some miracle the land use-transportation system in Jakarta changed overnight into a smoothly flowing system, what could possibly happen? A new equilibrium would be reached where the attractiveness of Jakarta would invite more people and their businesses to migrate to the capital, until congestion and opportunities were again on a par with those in other cities. This makes any remedy for Jakarta traffic congestion dependent on a successful national urban land use-transportation policy.

Car ownership in Indonesia is still low. At present two-thirds of all motorized vehicles in Indonesia are two wheeled; in the year 2001 some 300,000 vehicles were sold plus 1.65 million motorcycles. Nationally, only one-sixth of all motorized vehicles comprise cars.

As the fourth most populated country in the world with many mega-population cities, car travel should not be the favored transportation solution for the larger cities. This would imply that almost all provincial capitals need a mass transportation system as part of their land use-transportation systems.

It would maybe take at least another quarter century for all cities to solve their land use-transportation issues if they started today. The present system of regional autonomy should be utilized to develop regional centers into more attractive locations as compared to Jakarta. But until then, Jakarta traffic has to continue to suffer, despite all efforts at improvement.