Busway going nowhere

Busway going nowhere with only four months left
Novan Iman Santosa, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

With less than four months to go, it appears little preparation has been done for the construction of city administration's plan to build a busway between Blok M in South Jakarta and Kota in West Jakarta.
The Rp 54 billion (US$6.13 million) busway is expected to start operation by the end of this year. The completion of the busway, devised by Yogyakarta's Gadjah Mada University, was initially set for October but has been postponed to December.

Despite the apparent lack of preparation, City Transportation Agency head Rustam Effendy is confident the busway will be operational by the end of this year.

"I am sure that the construction will be finished in time so that residents will be able to use the new public transportation system by the end of this year," he told reporters on Tuesday.
"We are still preparing detailed plans for the bus stops. Designing is quick but the administrative process takes some time. We will start the tender process soon."

The bus stops will be platforms that are at the same level as bus floors, thus making it easier and faster for passengers to embark and disembark.
Only passengers with tickets will be allowed to enter buses so there will be no transactions between passengers and drivers, reducing the risk of financial losses.
Busway vehicles will have doors on the right side instead of the left because the buses will use the right fast lane.

Separately contacted, the agency's head of the traffic division, Pristono, told The Jakarta Post that buses would only be able to stop at designated bus stops because of the special design of bus stops.
"This way, passengers will not be able to ask drivers to stop just anywhere. They must discipline themselves," he said.
"The size of each bus stop will be different from stop to the next in such a way as to accommodate the different capacities related to passengers' demand."
Pristono said the busway would have 20 bus stops and 60 85-seater buses with a frequency of one and half to five minutes.

Rustam said it had not yet been decided from where the buses would be procured, but the agency had had many offers.
"This is a specific kind of bus so we must be sure about its quality. We want the buses to last for a long time," he said.
Rustam, however, said he preferred buses made by Japanese Hino or German Mercedes-Benz.

There is also a plan to create a city-owned company to operate the first busway route so that the system can be evaluated before other routes are offered to private companies.
The second route being studied is the Hotel Indonesia traffic circle in Central Jakarta to Rawamangun, East Jakarta, route.

The deputy chairman of City Council's Commission D on development affairs, Ali Imran Husein, has criticized the delay in construction of the busway.
"The 2002 city budget was approved earlier this year and there was enough time to start the project. The agency first planned the project last year, so there is no reason why it won't be started until late this year," he told the Post.
"City councillors have not even received a detailed plan of the project even though the proposed operational time is approaching."

Ali also questioned the possibility of cutting down trees along the busway, saying it would interfere with the City Parks Agency's budget.
"The parks agency budget covers maintaining the trees, but the project requires them to be cut down. It is such a waste of money. Why don't both agencies coordinate their plans?"

Meanwhile, the head of the City Parks Agency, Mauritz Napitupulu, said his agency had yet to receive a detailed plan for the construction from the transportation agency, especially concerning the cutting down of trees along the bus route.
"I do not know how many trees need to be removed. We can uproot the trees, especially the young ones, instead of cutting them down."
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A trial and error job

The Jakarta Post

Sometimes Jakarta, the overcrowded national capital of 10 million people, becomes a laboratory where trial and error experiments are conducted, a consequence of the poor planning that goes into the Herculean task of solving the city's problems.

The city authorities have now come up with a fresh plan for reducing the burden that endless traffic congestion imposes on the people. Early this week, the City Council approved an allocation of Rp 54 billion (US$5.4 million) from the 2002 city budget for a busway project connecting Blok M in South Jakarta with downtown Kota in the west. Deputy chairman of the council's Commission D for development affairs, Ali Imran Husein, claimed that the project would improve public transportation in Jakarta.

The core of the problem is that there are simply too many cars in the city, which has only 6,500 kilometers of road. Another scary statistic is that the number of vehicles increases by 18 percent every year while the road network grows by only four percent. The abundance of vehicles means that traffic jams grow worse and worse every day.
This situation has seen vehicles move more and more slowly from year to year, reducing the number of bus trips. This also causes the condition of the city's cars to deteriorate more rapidly while making operational costs higher and profits lower. The poor condition of the buses and the inept service offered by their drivers have convinced many people of the need to own their own car. This will in turn worsen the already choking traffic jams, which some say are among the worst in the world.

As part of the project, which is due to start in October of this year, the authorities plan to cut down hundreds of trees along the Blok M-Kota route, especially on Jl. Sisingamangaraja, Jl. Jendral Sudirman and Jl. MH. Thamrin, in order to make way for the development of bus shelters and other facilities for the new transportation system. According to the city's plan, buses will ply new routes to be established in the roads' center lanes, which will be dotted with new bus stops. Passengers alighting from the buses will be able to cross the road using pedestrian bridges. How commuters are meant to get to Blok M, for example, to catch a bus, is another question. They are not supposed to drive their own cars there because of a lack of parking spaces.

Despite these problems, many people in both the City Council and City Hall are said to be very proud of the "new masterpiece". But it was heartening to hear that a number of councillors have expressed concerns that the project, designed by transportation experts from the Yogyakarta-based Gadjah Mada University, could fail.

Outside the corridors of power many others have predicted that the project will cause more traffic jams and further environmental damage. The first casualties of the project will be, of course, private cars. And the congestion will remain. So where is the wisdom?

And the construction of more pedestrian bridges? Everyone knows that Jakartans are very reluctant to use these facilities, and will only do so if forced. They prefer to cross the busy and dangerous roads. We would envisage that the new bridges along the busway will serve partly as decoration. Unlike Singaporeans or Malaysians, it will take at least two more generations before our nation makes its people respect the rules. Building iron fences in the middle of the road will serve no purpose, because pedestrians have a particular talent for tearing them down.

The debate reminds us that Jakarta's real problem is its status as an overpopulated metropolis full of poor people with low levels of discipline. There are also too many rotten city buses and private cars. And arrogant land transportation officials. In most cases, the officials have been too supercilious to retreat from the failures of their trial and error experiments. The three-in-one traffic system along Jl. Jendral Sudirman -- introduced many years ago -- has long been a shameful exercise, in which poor young boys join others in flagrantly flouting the rules. This disgrace has lately been combined with the failure of the newly-introduced one-way traffic system from Jl. Sultan Iskandar Muda and Jl. Bintaro Jaya in South Jakarta, which has almost totally failed. All that remains there now is the indifference of its architect.

Returning to the new plan to ease congestion along the city's main north-south thoroughfare, we regret to say that it looks like an example of development through cannibalism. Overhauling and reconstructing the expensive thoroughfares, built at the cost of billion of rupiahs, and cutting down trees that were planted "with blood and sweat", even though the benefits remain questionable, is a show of recklessness.

And the planned procurement of some 50 air-conditioned buses, the operation of which will be later auctioned off to private concerns, reeks of corruption, collusion and nepotism and will surely provoke public suspicions, in the absence of effective supervision in the bureaucracy.

So, it would be wise for the city authorities to abort the plan because it will only benefit a few people to the cost of many.
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$5.4m budget for bus project approved

Ahmad Junaidi, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The City Council has approved an allocation of Rp 54 billion (US$5.4 million) from the 2002 city budget for a busway project connecting Blok M in South Jakarta with downtown Kota in West Jakarta.

Deputy chairman of the council's Commission D for development affairs, Ali Imran Husein, claimed that the project would improve public transportation in Jakarta.

"We support it but we would also urge the city administration to better explain the technical details," Ali, of the United Development Party, told reporters on Monday.
He said the planned procurement of some 50 air-conditioned buses should be done transparently to avoid public suspicions about possible corruption in the project, which is due to start in October of this year.

The busway project was one of several projects included on the agenda of a two-day meeting held by the council to discuss the city's Rp 8.9 billion draft budget in Puncak, Bogor, West Java.
But because the meeting ended inconclusively last Friday, the council approved the busway project during an extension of their meeting at the council building here on Saturday.

A number of councillors feared that the project, which was designed by transportation experts from the Yogyakarta-based Gadjah Mada University, would cause traffic jams and environmental damage.
Hundreds of trees along the Blok M-Kota route, especially along Jl. Sisingamangaraja, Jl. Jend. Sudirman, and Jl. MH. Thamrin, will be cut to pave the way for the development of bus shelters and other facilities for the new transportation system.

Ali of the United Development Party warned the administration about possible environmental damage as a result of the project's development.
"The cutting of the trees should be carried out carefully. It's okay if it will only involve cutting the tops of the trees, not felling them completely," he told reporters.

As the new system will require dedicated bus lanes and reduce the lanes available to private cars, it is feared that the plan could worsen traffic congestion along the affected roads.
"Yes, it will create traffic jams. It will be inconvenient for private car owners. But, we cannot please everybody," the City Transportation Agency's Program Management Division head D.A. Rini said.

Although the project has yet to commence, the Indonesian Land Transportation Owners' Association (Organda)'s Jakarta chapter head Aip Syaifuddin rejected the project if it would cause losses to his association's members.
"If some of our bus routes are going to be taken over by the project, we will reject it," Aip told reporters at City Hall.

However, he praised the new system for instituting a monthly fixed salary for drivers. The current system requires the drivers to pay a daily rental fee, thus causing their daily income to fluctuate according to the number of passengers they carry per day.
As a result, drivers are inclined to take on as many passengers as possible and to drive recklessly without paying attention to traffic signs and passenger safety.
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