NGO warns city about 'flaws' in new busway

Damar Harsanto, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

As the Jakarta administration completes construction of two new busway corridors this year, a non-governmental organization is warning about flaws that could undermine the operation of the corridors, including the failure to integrate the Senen railway station into the system.

"The administration is going to lose between 20,000 and 25,000 passengers a day by failing to integrate the Senen railway station into the new busway routes," the executive director of the New York-based Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), Walter Hook, said here on Thursday.

The new busway routes will link Pulogadung in East Jakarta with Harmoni in Central Jakarta, and Harmoni with Kalideres in West Jakarta. The administration opened the first busway route in January last year, connecting Blok M in South Jakarta with Kota in West Jakarta.

"Another thing the administration has yet to consider is the high demand of passengers who want to transfer from one busway route to another route. If there is no free transfer between corridors, we estimate that the demand will drop by 35 percent since the passengers will be reluctant to pay more during the transfer," Hook said.

Hook said improvements in the ticketing system to integrate the first busway corridor with the new busway corridors was urgent to make the system much more efficient.

The ITDP, with the support of USAID and the University of Indonesia's Center for Transportation Studies, recently questioned about 70,000 busway riders for their comments on the system.

"We learned that many passengers complained that they already felt overcrowded aboard the buses while the capacity of the buses is still relatively low or only 2,700 passengers per hour per direction," Hook said.

These complaints will grow in the future when the new busway routes become operational, doubling the number of passengers to 4,000 per hour per direction, if the administration does not make any technical improvements to the existing busway system, he said.

Among the technical improvements recommended by the institute was placing additional doors in every bus and shelter in order to ease passengers getting on and off the buses, significantly reducing the boarding time and increasing the headway of the buses.

Headway is the period of time between the arrival and departure of a bus at a shelter.

According to the ITDP's projections, adding additional doors in buses and shelters would significantly reduce boarding time from 45 seconds to 22 seconds, and in turn boost the capacity of the buses to take 6,000 passengers per hour per direction.

The institute also recommended the use of articulated buses to further upgrade the capacity of the buses to 9,600 passengers per hour per direction.

Meanwhile, City Transportation Agency head Rustam Effendy said the administration would continue work on the new busway corridors beginning in mid-July. Construction on the corridors was halted because of delays in the disbursement of funds from the 2005 city budget.

The city administration has allocated more than Rp 500 billion from the 2005 budget for the completion of the two new busway corridors, which are scheduled to open in December.

The first busway corridor cost about Rp 240 billion to complete.