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Jakarta. Jakarta Governor Fauzi Bowo was non-committal when asked about a suggestion to move the capital from Jakarta to Palangkaraya, Central Kalimantan, from a member of House Commision II.

“If the capital moves to Palangkaraya, you'll be the first ones to know,” he said to reporters during an event at the City Hall on Tuesday.

The idea resurfaced this week after Teguh Juarno, from House Commission II which oversees domestic affairs, said that due to traffic problems, Jakarta was “overburdened” as the center of commerce and financial.

“It is not a new notion. For decades, there has been this idea to move the capital to the central part of Indonesia, to Kalimantan. I think we have to revive this idea in Commission II meetings,” Teguh said in Vivanews.

He also cited the newly released Indonesia earthquake map composed by the National Quake Mapping Team. According to the map, called the Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Analysis (PSHA), Jakarta is one of the areas prone to strong quakes.

“The earthquake factor has also strengthened our belief that the capital must be moved,” Teguh said, adding that Kalimantan is one of the safest areas in Indonesia because it is further from tectonic plate activity than other cities.

On Wednesday Lukman Hakim, deputy chairman of the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), said that with too few roads and massive numbers of new vehicles rolling out every day, traffic was only going to get worse.

“In Jakarta, the number of cars being sold has now reached 300 units daily, while motorcycles could soon rise to 800 a day,” he said.

Traffic experts frequently cite the paucity of roadways in Jakarta, which make up only about 6.2 percent of its total area, as compared with metropolises such as Singapore, New York City and Tokyo, which devote up to 20 percent of their city space to roads.

With about 1.5 million vehicles in Jakarta squeezed onto roads that can only handle about one million, according to 2009 estimates, the result is a jumbled nightmare of mostly private vehicles — public transportation makes up only about 8 percent of all vehicles.

“It’s not surprising that we see traffic jams every day during peak hour,” Lukman said, “even on toll roads that were built to reduce traffic.”

He said the snarl was also a threat to the economy. Citing research by Firdaus Ali, an environment expert at the University of Indonesia, Lukman said traffic jams in the Greater Jakarta area were estimated to cost more than Rp 26 trillion ($2.8 billion) every year.