Drivers endure ‘Carmageddon’
Even on the best of days, it looks like an invasion, although a very slow one: troops of motorbikes, like a disorganized cavalry, try to slice through enormous, honking lines of buses, trucks, private cars and taxis that are locked in a crawling war of attrition on sclerotic highways and roads.
The war zone extends to sidewalks, a convenient shortcut for impatient motorbike drivers; and pedestrians and food cart vendors disrupt the traffic flow even more by illegally crossing the thoroughfares.
The traffic tie-ups get especially hellish during the morning and evening rushes. That’s true in most urban areas, but especially so in a city like Jakarta, at the centre of a metropolitan area of 28 million people and whose population of 10 million swells by about three million every workday.
Asked to describe Jakarta’s traffic congestion in five words or less, Yoga Adiwinarto, the Indonesia director for the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy in New York, needed only two: “Simply unmanageable.”
So commuters received an unpleasant surprise last month when Jakarta’s popular governor, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, temporarily suspended the capital’s “three-in-one” system, which prohibits private vehicles with fewer than three passengers from major roads around the city centre during the morning and evening rush hours.
As expected, the lines of vehicles, which extend to the horizon, moved even more sluggishly than usual, and the Indonesian news media called the experiment Carmageddon.
The temporary suspension of the three-in-one policy came amid questions about its effectiveness — but chiefly, Basuki said, because it was contributing to the exploitation of children.
The restriction, which dates to the late 1990s, quickly spawned an industry of industrious car jockeys who stand alongside roads leading into the restricted thoroughfares, offering lone motorists extra passengers in return for money, usually about 15,000 rupiah (about $1.43 Canadian) to 25,000 rupiah, depending on the distance. The jockeys, however, include boys and girls working alone, as well as mothers with infants.
In late March, the Jakarta police broke up a begging ring that enlisted children as panhandlers and rented out infants drugged with sedatives to adult beggars.
Yet transportation experts blame the city’s administration and police force for not cracking down on the jockeys, who number in the thousands and have undermined the three-in-one system’s effectiveness. An average jockey can earn the equivalent of $10 to $15 a day on weekdays, far more than the 100 million Indonesians who live on $2 a day or less.
The traffic patterns in Jakarta are a legacy of the 1960s, when Indonesia’s founding president, Sukarno, dismantled the Dutch colonial-era trolley system and paved over the tracks with asphalt.
Jakarta is one of the world’s few major cities without a rapid-transportation system. It also does not have a street grid. Although a train from Jalan Sudirman in the city centre to south Jakarta is under construction, it is not expected to open until the end of the decade.
Basuki has proposed an electronic road-pricing system, similar to those in London and Singapore, but does not have the legal authority to put it in place.