'Mismanagement at root of traffic'

The city administration will start the construction of a monorail and expand the busway system in June. However, there are doubts that these costly projects will be enough to ease the capital's traffic problems. The Jakarta Post asked some residents for their opinion on the matter.

Ameng, 30, a lawyer who lives in Tebet, South Jakarta, and works in Central Jakarta:

I'm not really affected by the transportation projects because most of the time I take an ojek (motorcycle taxi).

However, I support the city administration's intention to ease traffic congestion by developing the busway. But the busway cannot stand by itself. It needs to be supported by other traffic policies to reduce the number of private cars traversing the city's roads. For example, by increasing road tax for older cars.

As for the construction of the busway corridor, if there is a need to clear some land, the administration must be consistent. Don't evict only the poor. If necessary, they must have the power to evict, for example, office buildings on main roads.

Herjuno Wahyu, 28, is a freelance website developer. He is from Klaten, Central Java, but currently lives with friends in Tebet, Central Jakarta:

I see all these transportation projects -- the busway, the subway, the monorail, you name it -- as a desperate effort by the city administration to make up for its past failures to provide a good transportation system for its citizens.

The city's public transportation routes, for example, should be more than enough to serve the public's needs, but due to some mismanagement along the way, have become one of the main causes of the city's traffic problems.

Jakarta also has a very basic railway network that could have been developed into a sophisticated rail system like in any other modern city, but th administration has somehow failed to do so.

The busway and the monorail, in this case, are breakthroughs that will hopefully become a panacea for the situation.

The main problem now is how to ensure that these projects are well-planned and integrated, and are not plagued with mismanagement like other projects.

If they are, then we can forget all about the goals of solving the city's traffic problems, reducing pollution and so forth. They will just simply add to these problems.

--The Jakarta Post