Risk-taking Jakarta style: Crossing the road

Risk-taking Jakarta style: Crossing the road

Jacqueline Mackenzie, Contributor, Jakarta

The tiny Indonesian girl with glossy black hair and immaculate
school uniform looked about four years old, but I guess could
have been six or seven.

Still too young, I thought, to be crossing Jl. Hang Tua,
alone: eight lanes of polluted peak-hour hell. The kind of road
an average expat would worry about crossing themselves, let alone
allowing an unsupervised child to do so.

When I first saw the way small children cross Jakarta's busy
roads alone, I was horrified.

But this is the story of how -- after just over a year living
in Jakarta -- an Australian mother of three stopped worrying and
learned to love (well, feel much better about) the nightmare
roads of Jakarta.

It's also how I realized my views of what's dangerous and
what's not were formed by cultural forces much stronger than I
knew, until I got to live in a place as different from Australia
as Indonesia is.

For months after I began living in Jakarta, I held my breath
each time I saw young children negotiating their way through
traffic.

I'm not talking about street-kids, for whom traffic must be
only one of many dangers of living in the city, but the well-
washed, smartly uniformed school kids who daily dodge careening
decrepit buses, herds of Kijangs, swarms of weaving motorcycles
and the occasional impatient Mercedes.

Of course, Jakarta's streets are perilous for drivers and
cyclists too, but young kids? Couldn't some responsible adult see
them safely across?

I wrote this practice off as a slightly neglectful by-product
of the "life is cheap" reality of life here. Anyway, we didn't
think we'd have to deal with this hazard, as we expected to
travel pretty much door-to-door.

But soon after we arrived we discovered that driving our kids
to school, which had looked like a three-minute trip on the map,
was actually a 20-30 minute proposition, thanks to one-ways and
gridlock troublespots. We could, however, get there within 10
minutes if we drove half-way, crossed a major road on foot, and
then walked the last 300 meters.

But when I applied to the school administration for a "walker"
badge, I was told I would not be allowed to walk my children to
school. They had checked the route from our home to the school,
they said, and decided that it was too dangerous, even if an
adult walked with the children. It was not until we quoted a
regulation in the Parents' Handbook that stated children were
allowed to walk to school, with a "responsible adult" that the
school relented.

Then I had to get used to crossing the very kind of eight-lane
highway I'd dreaded.

Initially, I found it pretty challenging. Every school
morning, my driver and I would stand by the curb, each guarding a
child, all of us choking in exhaust, while I waited for an
Australian-style break in the constant stream of peak hour
traffic.

While he never showed it, my driver must have been pretty
bemused, as it was nothing for us to stand there for five or more
minutes until I considered it safe to cross. We could just about
have driven in that time.

But as the weeks went on, I started paying more attention to
how locals cross, including the young schoolchildren I'd
initially feared for. Slowly I copied, waiting for the traffic to
slow just a little, for a flicker of a smile on a driver's face,
or for one of the inner lanes to pause just a moment, then
walking out resolutely with my hand up.

And of course, as longtime Jakarta residents know, it almost
always works. Occasionally, a car screeches to a halt because
I've moved out too late, and more rarely there's an angry horn
blast (yes, usually from a Mercedes) telling us the driver's
coming through anyway.

If you tried this in Australia, you'd die from the torrent of
abuse hurled at you, if not the actual collision.

So why has this system of accommodating pedestrians developed
in Jakarta? My guess is it's a direct response to the fact that
there are few legal, safe places to cross, especially pedestrian
crossings. In their absence, the drivers -- with greater or
lesser degrees of graciousness -- have taken on the
responsibility.

Even though most expatriates think the roads here are a
nightmare, in fact most drivers are much more forgiving than
first world drivers to pedestrians, simply because no-one would
ever get across the road if they weren't. It's one way
Indonesians make this highly dysfunctional city a little more
livable.

I still can't quite get past my distrust of buses' brakes with
just a raised hand for protection, but I'm getting closer to
crossing roads Jakarta-style.