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.