NGO warns city about 'flaws' in new busway

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.