[sustran] Re: Becaks, bajas, ojeks in Jakarta

[Robert Cervero]

The story on the succession of vehicles in Jakarta, and the
mobility/environmental implications,  is not quite 
as simple as suggested in the earlier post.  With the becak and bajaj bans
in Jakarta city proper, what's occurring 
is spatial redistribution and filtering.  The spatial redistribution is that
the becaks and
bajajs are being pushed outside of Jakarta's city limits, to peripheral
neighborhoods like Cinere
(toward Bogor, where I happened to have lived a lot and still co-own a house
with my wife).  The
new market niche of the becak (and increasingly bajaj) drivers are
lower-middle class and middle-class
residential enclaves on the suburban/exurban fringes as well as rural
kampungs.  The becak is live and
well in Jakarta's outermost suburbs.  They're just no longer in the city
where rapid motorization has
left little space for them and poses significant safety risks to becak
drivers.  The variation in travel speeds across
Jakarta's vehicle fleets has become so great as to prompt this ban.  In some
very poor kampungs in the central city, you
still find becaks (and helicaks) operating; as long as they operate within
the neighborhoods only and don't venture onto
main roads, arteries, and collector streets, authorities generally ignore
them.  I think this role as internal circulators in kampungs 
is the correct one for becaks in cities like Jakarta.

The filtering process is not unlike housing filter -- as households'
incomes rise, they filter through higher end
housing products.  In the case of Jakarta's transport scene, the becaks and
bajajs are being replaced by
ojeks (motorcycles owned and driven by young men in 20s and 30s who have
saved enough to buy their
own two-wheeler and pick up rupiah on the side; this contrasts with the
becaks and bajajs which were largely
leased by all-too-often unscrupulous middle-men to the very hardworking
operators).  Oceks are now found
everywhere throughout metro Jakarta, at main depots of bus routes and
entrances to neighborhoods.  This
is laissez-faire transport at this best, and provides usually a
higher-quality (though somewhat higher-priced) door-to-door
feeder connection to and from mainline transit routes.  This entire
paratransit filtering process reflects Indonesia's on-going
advancement as a developing country, and is something that should be planned
for and generally encouraged, not 
resisted.  Markets generally work far better than planners in matching
transport supply and services to demand, assuming
social/environmental costs are appropriately internalized by travelers.
Therein lies the bigger problem in Jakarta and other
megacities -- gross mispricing of resources, perverse incentives effecting
travel behavior, inept regulations, non-enforcement,
corruption, poor citing of markets, etc., etc.  Mobility and environmental
problems should be attacked in these arenas, and 
not by any meddling with shifting  market preferences for travel.

The characterization of paratransit's  mobility versus sustainability
trade-offs is generally correct.  Smaller two- and three-stroke
engines generally pollute more on a passenger kilometer basis (not just in
terms of air pollutants, but also noise), though
a far bigger problem in places like Jakarta is the relatively old fleets of
vehicles without any catalysts to mitigate tailpipe emissions,
old and poorly maintained deisel buses, and leaded fuels (which Indonesia's
trying to regulate out of existence over the
next several years).  The potentially higher environmental costs of
three-stroke-engined paratransit must be weighed against the fact that
as more fleet-footed, flexible forms of transport, they're vital toward
getting people out of cars and into buses and trains.
They're important complements to mainline transit services, particularly in
sprawling metropolises like Jakarta, Bangkok, and
in particular, Mexico City.  Mexico City's metro wouldn't be carrying
anywhere near 4.5 million passengers per day were it
not for the tens of thousands of privately owned and operated colectivos
minibuses and peseros microbuses/vans that feed
into rail stops.  Thus, the bigger environmental value of any paratransit
mode lies in making public transport a reasonably
valuable alternative to driving.

If anyone's interested in any further details on these cases, chapter 4 of
my recent book on "Paratransit in America" (Westport, Co.:
Praeger Press) provides comparative case reviews of paratransit in S.E. Asia
(mainly Jakarta), Mexico City, and San Juan, Puerto Rico.