Overcoming Urban Congestion
The problem of urban transportation and congestion can basically be solved if people change their daily habits by using public transportation.
Many cities experience severe transportation problems, such as traffic jams, road accidents, environmental damage and excessive energy consumption.
The TomTom Traffic Index ranks annual urban congestion worldwide, covering 404 cities in 58 countries on six continents.
Jakarta and Hong Kong respectively rank 46th and 47th with a congestion index of 34 percent. Singapore ranks 88th with an index of 29 percent. Mecca ranks 404th, with the lowest level of congestion. Bangkok ranks 74th with a congestion index of 31 percent.
Various steps and methods have been tried to control urban congestion. News and discourse about traffic jams is similar to talk about the weather forecast: Constantly discussed, but the weather is not friendly, and traffic jams continue for various reasons.
Starting from undisciplined road users, growth in vehicle numbers that exceed road capacity, promotion of public transportation that is not yet optimal, construction of malls everywhere, even on roads that are already full of malls, as well as minimarts, and so on. Other people have a different view: traffic congestion means there is an economic pulse. Street hawkers at road junctions can earn money. Even the “polisi cepek” (informal traffic controllers) benefit, but the traffic police must work hard to manage traffic.
Plans and actions to move the capital city are already rolling. Will Jakarta be less congested in the future?
Human mobility
The data on human mobility in Jabodetabek (Greater Jakarta) shows a mobility rate of 80 million people per day. The rate is 38 million people for Jakarta alone. If the 25-30 percent of short-distance commuters is deducted from this figure, at least 20 million people are still mobile every day in Jakarta alone, and 60 million people in Greater Jakarta.
With only 20-30 percent currently using public transportation, the target of achieving 60 percent of public transportation users in both Jakarta and Greater Jakarta by 2039 is very ambitious.
I suddenly recalled the 17 steps to overcome Jakarta's traffic jams taken during the Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (SBY) administration through a special presidential unit called the Presidential Working Unit for Development Supervision and Control (UKP4).
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What has been discussed until now is just that. One of the most strategic is the plan to make rail-based public transportation the backbone of community mobility in Jakarta and Bodetabek (Bogor, Depok, Tangerang, Bekasi). Other policies that have been enforced are the abolition of the 3-in-1 traffic rule and its replacement with the odd-even license plate policy, the school zoning system, parking arrangements, “congestion” tax (ERP), constructing unlevel railway and road crossings, building six toll roads, building non-toll arterial roads, building a monorail, light rail transit (LRT), mass rapid transit (MRT) and bus rapid transit (BRT) systems.
Even the BRT or a semi-busway network is now being widely imitated by other developing countries, especially for the reason of affordability compared to developing rail-based public transportation. The latest development is the phenomenon of on-demand transportation, both motorbikes and cars. This has long been ongoing and still makes regulators stutter in its regulation.
Only a few countries have been quite assertive, one of which is Singapore. Most countries are still tugging at seeking fair arrangements.
‘Mobility as a service’
The next wave is on-demand multimode transportation platforms, dubbed Mobility as a Service (MaaS). MaaS combines various modes of on-demand transportation so urban residents will no longer be dependent on private transportation, because using MaaS is more convenient and cheaper. The implementation of transportation 4.0 has some advantages, such as during the Covid-19 pandemic. Service providers and businesses in the digital economy have taken advantage of big data to survive and grow very rapidly.
The next wave based on block chain technology is to apply account-based ticketing (ABT) to public transit networks. This system has been adopted by many foreign cities. Just like online marketplaces, public and private transportation operators can open and offer their services through ABT aggregator services.
This concept also aims to outperform private vehicle use in the long term so that vehicle ownership will decline and people will choose to rent or share vehicles.
Under Bappenas coordination, several cities in the country are currently preparing or have prepared Urban Mobility Plans (UMP).
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Local expert partners are usually involved in each study. The research team, together with the local administration, makes a diagnosis and offers recommendations for improving urban transportation over the next 20 to 30 years. The process involves knowledge and policy transfers as regards transportation planning and traffic engineering.
For reasons of affordability from the regional fiscal perspective, only the city of Jakarta is deemed capable of developing rail-based public transport services in the long term. The rest can develop only road-based public transportation, such as buses and busways.
In fact, Jakarta, which can only set aside 6-15 percent of its regional revenue and expenditure budget (APBD) for infrastructure development, has to start thinking now about attracting private sector investments so it can continue to build railways.
The problem is that rail is a very public domain, that is, it is not profitable. Meanwhile, rail infrastructure has an investment allocation of at least 60-75 percent of the total development budget. Thus, what is feasible and can be offered to the private sector are the train fleet and its operation.
The Coordinating Economic Minister is currently preparing regulations related to land value capture (LVC), or capturing valuable areas for infrastructure development. This regulation will serve as a legal umbrella for applying LVC as additional income apart from ticket sales, especially in areas around transit hubs under construction.
Learning from neighbors
Singapore has a policy designed to increase the cost of owning a car in an effort to reduce the number of vehicles on its roads.
This is done through a system that requires registering the right to own and use a vehicle for several years, otherwise known as a certificate of entitlement (COE), a kind of car purchasing quota intended to suppress growth in vehicle ownership. Purchasing a car in Singapore costs four times more than in the United States.
Since 1975, this "Land of the Merlion" has implemented area licensing schengen (ALS), a kind of entry subscription to restrict cars from entering the downtown area. Electronic road pricing (ERP), or congestion tax, in Singapore currently ranges from S$0.50 to S$3 per trip, depending on the time and location. The ERP was implemented by the Land Transport Authority in 2009 to replace the earlier ALS.
The problem of urban transportation and congestion can basically be solved if people change their daily habits by using public transportation.
The plan to set staggered office hours to the city is only temporary and not well planned, and will not be effective. The simpler experiment of companies offering flexible working hours is still adequate, as long as the total required hours are met. However, this process is still deemed very slow and there has been minimal investment due to limited public funding.
Especially for developing rail-based transportation in urban areas, the major challenge is its highly cross-sectoral nature. Short-term policies to overcome congestion will fail in the end because it is like giving paracetamol to a person with fever. Why not try the more basic method of giving antibiotics, like in Singapore’s experience? The effective collaboration of stakeholders, such as the traffic police, the local administration, the central government and industry, will be very decisive.
The problem of urban transportation and congestion can basically be solved if people change their daily habits by using public transportation. However, people will only want to switch to public transportation if the service is convenient, easy to access and cheap. Could it be that the problem of urban congestion has occurred all this time precisely because of congestion among institutions that did not coordinate with each other?
Harun Al-Rasyid Lubis
Harun al-Rasyid Lubis, Professor at the Bandung Institute of Technology
This article was translated by Kurniawan Siswo.
