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Officer Didin has to undergo a psychological examination every six months.

Small wonder. The 28-year-old has a job where the stress level is off the charts. He’s a traffic cop at the Semanggi flyover, one of the busiest thoroughfares in Jakarta.

In the course of an average day spent in the smog and hot sun, Didin tries to untangle the endless snarl of vehicles while being the target of screaming motorists and risking the odd bump from a passing car or motorcycle. Here on the front lines of the daily battle to keep Jakarta moving, Didin, who would only give his nickname, complains that motorists seem to think he’s responsible for the traffic nightmare while he fears that his police health insurance policy may not even cover his injuries if he’s run over by a Metro Mini.

These workaday worries might explain why Didin and his 6,000 fellow city traffic officers are routinely tested to make sure they won’t snap under the pressure.

“If we are bad-tempered, it would be dangerous for everyone,” Didin said. “We’re not the ones who are responsible for the traffic jams. What about the city transportation office?”

Good question. What about the Jakarta Transportation Agency? Or the entire city government, or even the national government? Maybe the traffic should be blamed on a succession of Jakarta governors or perhaps even the past and present leaders of the country?

The point is that no single person or agency can be blamed for a collective failure of urban leadership and planning that dates back at least to the 1960s. This has led to what we have today: a city that’s barely tolerable because of traffic problems brought on by rapid growth, poor public transportation and too many cars.

“It’s more like California. Everybody drives,” said Harya Setyaka S Dillon, a transportation expert. “It’s an urban planning issue.”
Commuter trips into Jakarta from surrounding areas increased tenfold between 1985 and 2002, and today around 1.25 million people go into or out of the city for work each day.

The roots of the snarl go back to 1960 when President Sukarno ordered that the city’s electric trolleys be replaced by large gasoline-powered buses due to projected urban growth. By paving over the trolley tracks, Sukarno set in motion a policy where vehicles and roads were given priority over mass transit and pedestrians (see page 4).

Conspiracy theories abound that the government colluded with the automobile industry to push vehicle sales and toll roads, but whatever the reason, there has been little political will to establish an integrated transit system consisting of buses, commuters trains and a subway or other mass transit platform.

Today, Jakarta’s public transportation system is disjointed, inefficient and unsafe. It’s no wonder that only 30 percent of the people in the city use public transportation, and 70 percent use cars or motorcycles.

“It should be the other way around,” said Tulus Adadi of the Indonesian Consumer Organization. “The reason people are [using] private vehicles is because of dissatisfaction with public transportation.”

By most official estimates, there are around 1.5 million motorized vehicles — cars, motorcycles, buses and bajajs — on Jakarta’s streets each day but the road capacity is only 1 million vehicles. Less than 8 percent of those vehicles are for public transportation, which is disturbing given that one large public bus filled with passengers would remove 30 privately-owned cars from the road.

Around 60 percent of all vehicles in Jakarta are motorcycles, and more than 1,000 new bikes hit the streets each day. Between 2000 and 2007, the number of motorcycles increased 250 percent, while the average speed on roads dropped from 26 to 20 kilometers an hour, said Bambang Sustanto, chairman of the Indonesian Transportation Society.

In response, he said, the city administration could only muster “piecemeal policies” like the TransJakarta busway, which remains inefficient (see page 10); the rush hour 3-in-1 car policy on Jalan Sudirman, which is rendered moot by the ever-present illegal car jockeys (see page 10); and the monorail project, which is stalled (see page 16).

So the city’s traffic problems increase by the year. Today, on any given trip in Jakarta, motorists spend 60 percent of their time stopped. If private vehicle numbers continue to grow at the same levels, by 2020 greenhouse gases in Greater Jakarta will be 2.35 times higher than their 2002 levels, according to a groundbreaking transportation study by the Japan International Cooperation Agency.

The only time Jakarta is a pleasant place to be, city dwellers lament, is during a major holiday, like Idul Fitri, when the population clears out.

Quips aside, bad traffic has serious economic consequences. Jakarta loses up to $1 billion a year due to gridlock, and according to the JICA study, by 2020 the accumulated economic losses — vehicle operating costs and travel time — will be $6.9 billion a year.
Already five years old, the JICA study remains the authoritative source on Greater Jakarta’s traffic and public transportation problems. Still the city administration has yet to implement any of its suggestions.

“We are late in anticipating the problem,” concedes Eddy Toet Hendratno, chairman of the Jakarta Transportation Council, which advises the city government.

The statistics speak for themselves. Jakarta’s roads account for only 6.2 percent of the city, while in New York, Tokyo or Singapore it’s 15 percent to 20 percent, according to transportation experts.

The present growth rate of Jakarta roads is 0.9 percent a year, but vehicle growth is 9 percent, so by 2014, according to city officials, there will be total gridlock unless something is done.

We are in a perfect traffic storm created by the combination of inefficient public transportation, too many vehicles, lousy drivers and encroachment onto roads by street vendors, minivans and buses.

Mohammad Akbar, head of road traffic engineering at the Jakarta Transportation Agency, said 92 percent of motorists — the kind of people traffic cop Didin deals with all day — violate traffic rules. “It’s the principle of supply and demand,” he said. “The supply of the roads and the demand of the motorists is unequal.”

The city plans to implement a new “strategic package” that includes constructing a mass rapid transit railway beginning in 2011 (see page 14), building more toll roads and elevated highways, and attempting to limit private vehicle ownership through higher registration taxes for second cars and schemes such as electronic road pricing (see page 12). No one knows when such plans will be implemented.

Still, even with a shiny new subway, transportation experts say, people have to be convinced to leave their cars at home. A study by the Indonesian Consumer Organization found that in 10 cities, the average Indonesian spends 12 percent to 14 percent of his or her income on public transportation, which is higher than the international average.

One of the reasons this happens in Jakarta is because there is no unified network. Seventy-nine percent of public transportation users here change transportation modes at least once to get to their destinations, and that costs money.

“There’s a systemic problem that causes people to spend more on transport,” Tulus said. “A liter of gas costs Rp 4,500 (48 cents) but public transportation could cost Rp 15,000 to 20,000 a day. [A motorcycle] may not be the most ideal means of transportation, but it’s the fastest and most economical.”

“Mobility is a source of economic opportunity,” said Dillon, the transportation expert, explaining why the poor will go deep into debt just to own a motorcycle. The same goes for affluent car owners.

“Public transportation can’t attract car drivers because buses and trains don’t run on time and are always delayed,” said Purnomo Prawiro, president director of the Blue Bird Group. “There’s no benefit for them.”

As Jakarta tries to implement a medium-term vision for the future of public transportation, some experts are warning city officials not to forget that more cars and motorcycles aren’t the only causes of traffic jams.

One prime example is Pasar Cipulir near Ciliduk, South Jakarta, where it can take 45 minutes to drive two kilometers near the market.

That’s because one lane of the six-lane road is blocked by street vendors selling fruit, food and assorted trinkets. A second lane is blocked by public minivans and buses. Police stationed at the market do nothing except shout into their walkie-talkies and watch the traffic back up. “Road violations must be reduced first,” said Akbar. “But law enforcement is very poor.”

Not so fast, says Adjutant Comr. Kanton Pinem, a senior officer at the Jakarta Traffic Police. He said the municipal public order department is in charge of public markets and if his men tried to force the vendors onto the sidewalks, they would face a riot.

“The solution is to have a proper bus terminal there,” said Kanton, adding that the police have tried to get the city to build proper facilities. “After they do that, then we can talk about giving tickets to buses that illegally park there. Even if we had 15,000 traffic policemen it would not be useful if the behavior on the roads is wrong.”

Mohammad Danisworo, chief city urban planning adviser to five Jakarta governors, said part of the blame rests on the endless flow of rural migrants into the capital each year (it was around 250,000 in 2008 alone).

“Unfortunately, these people don’t pay attention to the rules,” he said, joking that traffic in Jakarta would disappear overnight if all the city’s residents were replaced by rule-friendly Singaporeans.

Despite the dire predictions and tough choices, it’s not all doom and gloom for our fair city, says Hongjoo Hahm, lead infrastructure specialist at the World Bank.

He said Indonesia’s era of decentralization is allowing regional and local administrations to make their own decisions about public transportation projects, rather than being beholden to the central government.

“I remain optimistic about this. The busway is a decentralization dividend,” he said. Transportation experts can only hope that the subway proves to be a good second act.