The rains are coming

The rains are coming

The utter confusion that crippled Jakarta's traffic system
earlier this week was not a first for the Indonesian capital in
recent years. It was, however, assuredly one of the worst. In
several parts of the city, motorists were trapped for hours in
traffic snarls so huge it took them hours to travel a distance of
little more than a kilometer.

With traffic crawling or brought to a total standstill,
impatient motorists tried to outflank one another, thereby adding
to the chaos. To make matters worse, at many points along the
city's main arteries traffic lights did not function and traffic
police, where they were present, had their hands full trying to
make some order out of the chaos.

One might well ask what the reason was for all this chaos.
After all, it is no exaggeration to say that Tuesday evening's
chaos constituted a total and systemic breakdown of Jakarta's
traffic system.

On the surface of it, the answer seems obvious enough. For
many years now, Jakarta's traffic has become chaotic in many
places throughout the city every time a downpour occurs for a few
hours and with some degree of intensity, as was the case last
Tuesday. Or it may happen that heavy rains are falling in the
mountains in Jakarta's West Java hinterland, although the city
itself remains perfectly dry. Sections of roads, if not whole
neighborhoods, then get inundated and traffic is severely slowed
down.

Flooding, however, is only part of the answer. Another part is
the Jakarta city administration's apparent lack of attention to
the proper functioning of the city's traffic lights and other
public facilities under its jurisdiction. Another reason is the
lack of discipline on the part of Jakarta's road users -- meaning
not only motorists but cyclists and pedestrians as well -- which
severely contributes to Jakarta's traffic to be anything from
mildly disorderly to chaotic, even in the best of conditions.
Jakarta's motorists, in particular, are notorious for being
compliant to the law only as long as they know police are
watching them, then becoming erratic the moment they are not.

Lack of organization and coordination in and among agencies
seems to be another affliction standing in the way of putting
order in Jakarta's traffic. What, for example, happened to the
agency known as "kopro banjir", set up during the 1970s by then
governor Ali Sadikin, whose duty was to watch water levels in
rivers streaming into Jakarta and sounding the alarm as soon as
flooding appeared to be imminent?

In short, one lesson that last Tuesday's flooding and
resulting chaos on the roads can teach us is that many of the
things and circumstances that happen in a city such as Jakarta do
not stand on their own. In this latest case, Jakarta's dirty and
heavily polluted rivers and canals slowed down the drainage of
excessive water from city roads and neighborhoods. Ill-managed or
ill-planned road improvement projects and failure on the part of
the city authorities to warn citizens of the danger of flooding
in certain areas have added to the confusion.

The victim here is not just the motorist, who is being
inconvenienced. The economic cost, in terms of time and
opportunities lost, and fuel wasted, caused by traffic jams like
Tuesday night's is huge. This is not to mention the potential
security risk that such incidents bring. On Tuesday night, for
example, hundreds of stranded bus passengers lost their patience
and tempers and started walking along the roads banging their
fists on cars.

One would wish precautionary steps could have been taken well
before the rain started falling. However, now that the rainy
season is on Jakarta's threshold, serious assessment of the
possible impact on Jakarta is certainly warranted and
precautionary measures must be taken.