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After pledging to build a monorail in his hometown of Makassar, former Vice President Jusuf Kalla promised the same thing on Friday to the city of Bandung.

“Bandung is increasingly developing and has more and more tourists. In one or two years, it could be just as congested as Jakarta,” Kalla said, speaking after meeting with West Java Governor Ahmad Heryawan at Gedung Sate in the center of Bandung.

“This monorail for Bandung will facilitate people’s movement. There is just no other way but getting a mass transportation system and this is why I am interested in building a monorail here.”

Kalla said the monorail would be about 30 kilometers long. He hoped to break ground on the project next year, he said, but could not say how much it would cost. He offered his company, Bukaka, as the builder and financier of the monorail.

“On the investment value, wait a while. We have not even reached the technical stage,” he said.

Meanwhile, Heryawan welcomed the plan, at least in theory.

“It is true that congestion problems need to be solved with a mass transportation system,” the governor said.

“We believe that this program will play an important role in overcoming the transportation problems of the greater Bandung area.”

He said that Kalla had already signed an agreement with his predecessor, Danny Setiawan, and the offices of the mayors of the surrounding districts.

But Heryawan added that the cost of using the monorail needed to be minimized, otherwise it would not ease congestion.

One of the ways to keep the tariff down was to use local designers and builders to construct the new transit system, he said.

“The price could be half or a third of what it would cost for the engineering to be done by foreigners,” he said.

“God willing, the results of local engineering will be cheaper than a monorail produced by a well-known brand.”

He said the provincial administration was forming a committee involving representatives from the province, the municipality, the district and Bukaka.

The West Java transportation office head, Dicky Syaromi, agreed that a mass transport system was necessary

“Judging from the number of vehicles and the capacity of the roads to handle them, I estimate that within five years, with many nearing their volume capacity, one or more of the roads will already be gridlocked,” Dicky said.

He said that in the city’s main roads, congestion was already at a rate of about 80 percent and maximum speed was about 20 kilometers per hour.

Following Kalla’s presentation on the proposed monorail project, Dicky said the new transport system would link Buah Batu in the southern part of the city to Dago in the north. There would also be a peripheral route linking Pasirkaliki, Pajajaran and Merdeka.

“These routes will not only overcome the congestion but also allow passengers to move efficiently,” Dicky said.

The transportation official added that city authorities had proposed that the monorail also serve areas in the eastern part of the city, up to Jatinangor in neighboring Sumedang district.