Traffic in Indonesia’s capital - The race to beat total gridlock

TWO of the most resilient features of life in Jakarta are the mini-protest and the macro-jam. Almost every day some group or other takes their grievance to the city’s main landmark, the Bundaran HI traffic circle. However small the protesters’ number, they end up bringing traffic to a halt all around the city’s main thoroughfare.

The daily jams are not going to ease in the near future. Indeed, by most official estimates, they are likely to worsen, until sometime in 2014, when Jakarta will attain total traffic gridlock. Vehicles will take up every single inch of available space on roads and highways, leaving the city like a scene from a dystopian fantasy.

There are currently around 1.5m motorised vehicles—cars, motorcycles, buses and three-wheeled auto-rickshaws—on Jakarta’s streets each day, though the roads have space for only 1m of them. Streets account for only 6.2% of the city’s land mass, compared with 15-20% in New York, Tokyo or Singapore. The present growth rate of Jakarta’s roads is 0.9% a year, while vehicle growth is 9%; demand is driving circles around supply.

Jakarta is estimated to lose $1 billion a year due to traffic, which is as bad as any city in Asia. Its collective failure of urban planning dates back at least 50 years, and has left the city with no integrated system of public transport. Drivers feel they have no alternative. About 70% of the people in Jakarta use private vehicles.

For at least 20 years, the city’s proposed solution to the impending calamity has been to build a system of mass rapid transit (MRT) that will also integrate the haphazard bus and train routes. But successive city governments never mustered the political will to do it—until now. The city has signed a $1.3 billion loan agreement with the Japanese International Co-operation Agency (JICA), the aid arm of the Japanese government, to build an MRT system, with construction due to start next year and be finished by 2016. Indonesian officials hope they can stave off traffic doomsday before then by expanding their “busway” (dedicated traffic lanes) and commuter-train systems, and building new roads.

The MRT would be one of the most expensive public projects in Jakarta’s history. Indonesia is among the most corrupt countries in the world, and activists and non-governmental watchdogs are already warning that the MRT will be a bonanza for corrupt politicians, transport officials, and contractors.

Optimists point to the experience of the Japanese-financed metro system in Delhi—an almost unique example in that country of on-time, on-budget infrastructure development. Pessimists, however, look at the corruption that marred the construction of Thailand’s Suvarnabhumi airport, and its still-unopened train service to the centre of Bangkok.

An NGO, Indonesia Procurement Watch (IPW), has already accused the Japanese government and Indonesia’s Ministry of Transportation of collusion in selecting the designer of the MRT system. Officials at JICA deny any irregularity in the award of the contract to Nippon Koei, a Japanese engineering firm. They also say IPW never even contacted them to ask about the contract, and deny the group’s claim that its activists were thrown out of its Jakarta office.

Still, any hint of foul play could be fatal for the project. Corruption is the biggest political issue in Indonesia. If the Corruption Eradication Commission, which is finding its feet again after two of its deputy chairmen were apparently framed by police officials for bribery, detects even a whiff of graft, the entire MRT project could be shut down indefinitely. And with it, Jakarta’s streets.