[sustran] becaks-reaction to Dr. Cervero

[Institute for Transportation and Development Policy]

I was very disappointed by Dr. Cervero's comments about the becaks and bajaj
in Jakarta.  His new book on Paratransit is excellent, but I'm afraid
despite his long experience in Indonesia that I cannot agree entirely with
his perception of the situation there.

Just as with housing 'filtering', which tends to result in a shortage of low
income housing, hence the numerous homeless in American cities, the process
of transport mode 'filtering' in Jakarta is hurting the mobility and
increasing the costs of lower income residents.  The oceks are both more
expensive and very inconvenient for women carrying parcels and wearing
traditional Indonesian clothes.  Women particularly feel this reduction in
their mobility.  They are operated by a higher class of people than operated
the becak and bajaj, and hence do less to provide employment to low income
people.

Further, this 'filtering' is not, as Dr. Cervero seems to suggest, a
market-driven process.  The becak and now the bemo and the bajaj were not
driven out of Jakarta's downtown neighborhoods by the invisible hand of the
'market', they were driven out by police power.  This police power was used
for a variety of reasons.  While Dr. Cervero seems to accept the
government's rationalization that 'the variation in travel speeds across
Jakarta's vehicle fleet has become so great as to prompt this ban," in my
view this is a spurious argument.  The traffic is such in Jakarta that
nobody is traveling more than 5 or 10 km an hour-roughly the speed of a
becak.  Travel speeds suffer from too many vehicles with too few passengers
consuming too much road space, and only marginally by differences in vehicle
travel speeds.   The problem in high-density Java is that the population
density is too high to support much further extension of space-intensive
auto travel, and the failure to allocate street space in a way which
facilitates the travel of buses, paratransit, and non-motorized modes all of
which consume less street space than the taxis and cars which clog the
streets.

Plans for an extensive network of exclusive bus lanes, proposed nearly 8
years ago by the World Bank, have languished for lack of political support,
as conflicting plans for light rail and metro, pushed by well connected
businesses (ie. family of the President) jockey for position.  I think the
bans on becak, and now bemo and bajaj, have more to do with prejudice
against modes identified with the poor, and probably because the decision
maker (notice the singular) in that country does not profit directly from
the small shop becak industry they way he does from the motorcycle, taxi,
auto, and toll road industry.  Free market in Indonesia is mostly an
illusion; it means staying inconspicuous and small enough to not be noticed,
or being bought out by the family.  Its true that something like half the
becak fleet used to not be owner operated, but the other half was owner
operated.  This is probably not significantly different from other
paratransit modes.

In my view, the transport mess that is Jakarta, likely to become the world's
most polluted city within a decade according to the UN, is partially the
result of a planning process utterly devoid of public participation.
Decisions in this environment are made to favor those with money and/or
power, at the expense of those without, and of the environment.  Even the
most experienced planners in Indonesia, recently forming themselves into the
Indonesian Transport Society, are often impotent to impose rationality into
the planning process, let alone justice.

I will be working in Indonesia in November on behalf of SUSTRAN to work with
Indonesian groups interested in articulating the needs and desires of
transport users which tend to not get heard.  Anyone who can help us in this
regard, your advice and assistance are most welcome.

Rgds,
Walter Hook
ITDP

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