Eid and Going Home for the Holidays

Jakarta is a much quieter place during the Eid celebration that takes place at the end of the fasting month. It is a much quieter place because the vast majority of residents return back to their home villages in the days before Eid and for a week or so after.

Although Jakarta is much quieter, everywhere else suddenly gets a whole lot less quite and sees a significant spike in traffic and the associated problems.

I read in today's Kompas Newspaper (the photo is from Kompas) that the 267 km trip from Jakarta to Cirebon was taking about 19 hours to complete. For my mind that means that you really must want to go home for the holidays. Apparently, on a 'normal' day this trip would take a leisurely 6 hours. This still seems like a long time to travel less than 300 km all the same.

Jakarta Traffic

This one is for the cynic in me. The police in Jakarta have conducted a 10-day operation in which they were targeting motorists who were breaching traffic laws and regulations. The underlying premise of this operation was to improve driver discipline. No drama there and good luck on the discipline front!

However, it is reported that the good police officers recorded more than 18,000 violations of prevailing traffic laws and regulations -- no shock there either! It is reported that from these 18,000 plus violations a mere 2,948 tickets / citations were issued. So, this means that there were more than 15,000 friendly warnings issued to the not so law-abiding motorists. One must assume that these 15,000+ offences were not so serious as to warrant a ticket.

But here is the thing, and this is the cynic in me, I have not come across that many police who are into free friendly warnings. My personal experience has always been that a free friendly warning always involves a "transaction" either a ticket or the Soeharto get out of jail free card, that nice blue IDR 50K note! The value of the transaction generally depends on the seriousness of the offence. The reason people pay is simple; going to court is a hassle and the payment to court officials is not any less! If you want to read about this practice there are plenty of descriptions on the web and a simple Google search will lead you to many of them.

The even more cynical me generally thinks that perhaps there were considerably more violations than the 18,000+ noted and that these were not recorded for whatever reason!

There is no doubt that motorists in Jakarta and more generally in Indonesia need to get some discipline happening but this is not gonna happen with operations like this no matter how many official and unofficial tickets are issued. The reality is there needs to be better technology to track people with driving licenses and cars. There also needs to be better enforcement; simply people who violate the law enough times in 12 months lose their license. If they get caught driving without a licence they pay a huge fine and if they get caught twice they pay an even bigger fine and if they get caught a third time then they should automatically enjoy the hospitality of the State in prison!

The government needs to install red light cameras and be active in fining people and taking their licenses away when they do not pay.

Perhaps an incentive system for police to catch and ticket people properly could be implemented. Although, an incentive system like this is susceptible to corrupt policing it would not be any more corrupt than the system now. Motorists could still contest the fine!

This sort of system would also alleviate employment and perhaps even transport issues in the capital, people losing licenses means they need to employ new drivers, hence increasing employment opportunities, or leave the car at home and therefore there are less cars on the road! A winner either way!

Likelihood of happening -- Zero! Yep, the big "0"...

The Holiday is Over - Traffic as Normal

The Idul Fitri Holiday and the extended or perhaps enforced annual leave for many finished on Sunday. Many Jakartans and undoubtedly many newcomers have been streaming into the city and its surrounds since Saturday and will continue to do so through the next week or so. The population of Jakarta will return to normal plus a few extras and so will the myriad of problems that confront Jakartans on a daily basis. These problems will also continue to haunt Jakarta's elected officials but unfortunately if history is any guideline then these leaders and officials are unlikely to make any significant inroads either.

The reality, and perhaps this is a cold hard reality, is that many of these problems are not only infrastructure or services related but cultural in mindset. The ongoing pollution of the environment is a classic example, although not scientific or empirical in measurement, on any given day as one walks along any of Jakarta's thoroughfares it is a regular sight to see people tossing their garbage on the ground. It is sometimes funny in that distinctly sad kind of a way when the person is standing next to an empty garbage bin.

The idea of a green environment and keeping the environment clean requires a cultural mindset shift among the population that it is no OK to pollute the environment, it is not OK to irrevocably damage your children's and their children's future because of your laziness or apathy. Yet, if this mindset is not possible without governmental encouragement, then simple the government must undertake to regulate fines and commit to imposing and then collecting those fines. The mindset will quickly change if you are suddenly whacked with an on-the-spot fine of IDR 500,000. Perhaps even a 3-strike rule where on your third offence within a 6-month period you are arrested and then summarily sentenced to 100 hours of community service, preferably picking up rubbish or cleaning out some of the nasty canals that criss-cross the city.

Yet, this entry was not really about the myriad problems facing Jakarta but merely to note that it is situation normal in Jakarta - traffic jams stretching in almost every direction sometimes further than the eye can see. The new Governor and his Deputy campaigned on a platform that was decidedly light on policy specifics, but now is clearly the time to get some policy specifics in place and confront what is an ever-worsening traffic congestion problem. It is simply the case that even once all of the new bus way corridors are open that those who can will continue to drive their cars to work.

This means that to overcome this desire the government of Jakarta has to commit to action and not to more rhetoric about what it is pretending to do or planning to do. This means doing whatever it takes to complete long-overdue projects like the monorail and to actively find financing for feasibility studies for an extensive subway system. The cold hard reality for the government here is that residents are not inspired to leave their cars at home when the trip to work is likely to involve long periods in hot, sweaty, smelly, and poorly maintained buses. This is exacerbated even further when the available quality public transport does not pass anywhere near where potential commuters live.

The alternative is that once quality public transport infrastructure is in place then those that wish to continue bringing their private vehicles into the confines of the city should do so at their own expense. For example all three in one zones should also include a levy which can be paid in advance and deducted automatically when the vehicle enters the relevant zone. This cannot be IDR 1,000 but something that encourages other modes of transport, so a levy of IDR 50,000 for each time the vehicle enters the zone. Conceivably this might add an extra IDR 3 or 4 million to your monthly expenses. Yet, any of these ideas rely heavily on enforcement and to a greater degree enforcement, or more specifically the lack of enforcement, has always been one of the biggest problems facing any administration.

But in some respects it is nice to return to all things normal even where they are more often frustrating than anything else.