Idling in Jakarta

It’s 6:30 am on a Saturday morning in Jakarta, Indonesia, and I’m on my way to the airport in a Blue Bird taxi for my flight back home to Ottawa. While my flight doesn’t leave for another four hours and the drive should only take 45 minutes, the city’s infamous traffic leaves me unable to relax until we’ve actually reached our destination.

It is not that Jakarta has completely skimped on transportation infrastructure. Jakarta is endowed with roads and highways that would be the envy of urban citizens in countless other emerging economy megacities. However, the rapid growth of Indonesia’s middle class over the last decade has introduced tens of thousands of new vehicles to Jakarta’s roads. As a result, while the same growth has brought substantial improvements in living standards, it has also reduced average driving speeds to a crawl, regardless of whether you’re driving a moped or a minivan.

Aggravating the situation is the city’s apparent lack of a modern rapid transit network. Though a dedicated bus lane links together some parts of the city, it appears to be largely underused and served only by a handful of aging buses reminiscent of a bygone era. Nowhere to be seen are the fast-expanding subway lines of New Delhi, India, or Kunming, China. The combined result of these factors is near constant gridlock and resignation amongst many residents that trips that should be of negligible duration are bound to be long ordeals.

This state of affairs seems to a foreigner visiting the city for the first time to be oddly incongruous with the city’s size and modernity. Large portions of the megacity of 10 million inhabitants resemble ultramodern Singapore more than they do the capital city of a still-developing country. Yet a major difference between these two cities is that nearby Singapore is endowed with a modern subway system that carries roughly 2.2 million passengers each day. Jakarta, in stark contrast, has nothing of the sort.

This brings to mind a frequent comment made by resident expats and locals alike: that the most obvious solutions to longstanding problems rarely see the light of day in this city. And when it comes to traffic, the “obvious solution” to Indonesia’s traffic woes would be light rail: lots and lots of light rail.

Yet efforts to make it a reality in recent years have gone largely nowhere; instead, they have been derailed by what is widely perceived to be gross corruption by implicated government officials and contractors. The most obvious indicators of this state of affairs are the dozens of concrete pylons erected in recent years to support an elevated rail system down the centre of some of the city’s main arteries. Yet sadly, these five- to eight metre-high structures have now stood half-completed for ages and have become monuments to waste rather than the symbols of progress they might have been.

While there will come a time when such an ambitious rapid transit project will have to be completed, no matter what, it is impossible to predict how many millions will be lost in the process, and how many people will make off with a piece of the pie. But one thing that can be said with certainty is that, if a city such as New Delhi can build a subway system that now carries over 1.8 million people a day along a network 190 km long with ambitions to quadruple in size, surely Jakarta can do the same. The 65 trillion rupiah question is: when?