Perennial transit trouble

Perennial transit trouble

Tourists from other developing countries are known to express surprise upon seeing hardly any old cars on Jakarta's streets. To them this seems to mirror an affluent society.

This first impression evaporates, however, once they see the crowds of people at the side of the roads trying to chase down the horribly overcrowded city buses during peak hours.

What they see is only the surface of the deep rooted and disturbing problem of the dehumanization our transit system causes. Once people enter the pickpocket infested buses they lose their significance as individual human beings to become abstract economic units labeled "passengers" which are worth only a few hundred rupiahs.

The drivers, well known to the public as demons on wheels, and their conductors, all of whom are driven by the need to meet the daily rent for the buses with which they earn their livings, jam as many as possible of these economic units into the buses.

Human life, much less dignity and traffic regulations, has ceased to have a meaning to bus crews due to the pressure of having to pay through the nose for the right to earn a living. This city has recorded countless instances of passengers having been killed due to the actions of desperate and reckless drivers.

The public, for which the transit system is a vital link in their daily activities, has yearned for the opportunity to choose from a variety of convenient and comfortable means of transportation for both long distance and short distance travel.

The vast majority of people in the capital, whose incomes prohibit the purchase of even a bicycle, let alone a motorcycle or a car, need not only the large buses provided along the main roads under the existing scheme of things, but also the kind of vehicles that can enter even the narrowest of the alleyways that crisscross their kampongs.

They need these vehicles to facilitate the running of their everyday errands, but also in case of emergency situations like accidents and births, especially those occurring at night when larger transit vehicles cease plying the streets.

There was once the slow moving pedicab, know locally as the becak, but it was cleared off the streets of the capital in 1990 to facilitate traffic flow. The drivers of the becak, which had crisscrossed the streets of Jakarta with passengers since World War II, had to go to other towns outside of Jakarta. Their bicycle cabs were then dumped into the sea to become habitats for coral and fish.

The man-powered pedicab was loved by people from all walks of life because it served several vital functions and met their basic transportation needs. Since the becak's passing, there has been no suitable replacement. Even the bemo and bajai, as well as the illegal ojek motorcycle taxis, that stepped in to try to meet the need, don't fill the bill.

Now Jakartans face even more transit-related uncertainty, with Jakarta Governor Surjadi Soedirdja saying on Wednesday that the municipal administration will soon start eliminating all other outdated vehicles from the streets of the capital city. The three-wheeled vehicles he was referring to are the bemo and the bajaj, which are no longer considered suitable for transporting passengers.

Surjadi said the ugly bemo will be replaced by a 1000-cc four-wheeled vehicle especially designed with the same five passenger capacity as the bemo to ply narrow residential streets.

One might ask "Why now, long after the bemo or bajaj clearly failed too replace the becak? The answer lies in the inability of the city authorities to find a suitable vehicle to replace the pedicab during the last four years. There was once the much talked about idea to introduce the tuk-tuk (three-wheeled, open- sided taxi which is popular in Bangkok). The idea was rejected by many people because the tuk-tuk is designed to carry a large amount of passengers at a time and people would end up waiting for the driver to fill it to capacity before moving.

The question foremost in everyone's mind at this moment must be just when this transit dilemma will be brought to an end.

We just hope that the authorities, who have clearly failed to formulate a viable modern public transportation system, will not drive away the bemo and bajaj before suitable vehicles to replace them are found to serve the public.

The people have long suffered from the phasing out of the becak and it is high time the authorities found some other way to meet their transit needs.