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It was a simpler Jakarta, and one now lost in time. Newly-independent Indonesia’s capital was abuzz with optimism and nationalist fever in the late 1940s — not to mention the sound of electric trolleys rolling through the city center and out to Menteng, which then was just a suburb.

The city’s streets, and its relatively efficient public transportation system, largely remained that way until the early 1960s, when a fateful decision forever altered Jakarta’s history. President Sukarno, foreseeing rapid growth, had the trolleys decommissioned and replaced with buses.

“The trolley was insufficient to transport crowds because it only had [at most] three carriages,” said Jakarta historian Andy Alexander. “If you add more, it doesn’t move.”

So the trolley lines were paved over with asphalt and replaced by giant gasoline-guzzling buses. City planners dreamed up thoroughfares to help push the city southward into the wetlands beyond Menteng.

But the envisioned road network never really happened, while development flourished virtually unchecked by regulations or zoning.
“They did have plans. They just never implemented them,” Alexander said. “Jalan Sudirman-Jalan Thamrin was good planning, but that’s it. Roads grew on their own, without any planning.”

Mohammad Danisworo, chairman of the Center for Urban Design Studies in Bandung, and an adviser to five Jakarta governors, says the city before independence was basically a network of kampungs. Newer ones sprung up in the 1950s and ’60s, he said, and all of them eventually joined the sprawl. “They built the houses, and the roads came later,” he said. “And sometimes those roads weren’t designed to handle this development.”

As a result, the city is sorely lacking in major east-west crossroads, but has an overabundance of one-lane roads snaking through neighborhoods and behind high-rise buildings.

Jakarta’s newer districts also were never designed to enable people to live, work, shop and take their kids to school in the same area. As a result, more than 1.25 million people make trips into or out of the city and back every workday. Modern urban planning dictates that “you plan everything in your neighborhood,” said Harya Setyaka S Dillon, a transportation expert. “That’s the problem: There was no vision for self-sustained communities.”

There was also no vision for pedestrians. Conspiracy theorists say foreign donors and international organizations such as the World Bank were eager to give loans and grants to build new roads and highways, all the better for imported American and Japanese cars. City officials gave scant consideration to sidewalks, crosswalks or other safety measures for foot traffic.

“Cities are [supposed to be] developed for people, not for cars,” said Milatia Kusuma Mu’min, Indonesian country director of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy. “The city of Jakarta provides only for cars and motorcycles. Now there’s an imbalance — all the protection is for the motorist.”

Well, most of the time. Jakarta is all but absent of public parking space, which leaves little option but to park on streets and sidewalks, thereby increasing traffic bottlenecks.

“There is only a small space on the roads, and the cars take up more space, which causes more problems,” said Sutikman, 54, a “blue shirt” city parking attendant who has worked on Jalan Sabang near Menteng for the past 30 years. “But I don’t want to say that parking causes traffic problems, because then my superior would think I haven’t been doing my job.”

The way the city’s streets have developed, someone somewhere clearly didn’t do theirs.