[sustran] becaks & bajajs

[Robert Cervero]

At the risk of backing myself into a cyber-debate, I've got a few comments
in response to Mr. Hook's contrasting views on the role of becaks and bajajs
in Jakarta.  Having lived over 3 years, off and on, in Jakarta and logged
many, 
many hours in becaks, bajajs, and their many cousins, both as a consumer and
curious observer, I've formed pretty strong opinions about questions of
management
and regulation of this sector. 

>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.

Modes like becaks and bajajs obviously arose to serve the mobility needs of
the poor in
megacities across the globe.  The question of whether they should be
regulated or 
even banned out of existence gets at the core of welfare economics (efficiency
versus equity) as well as the always sticky matters of income and class.
Jakarta's
officials -- largely at the urging of ex-pat traffic engineers -- decided
the efficiency/safety
benefits of removing pedal-powered vehicles off distributors and arterials 
outweighed equity considerations, and on balance, I and many others who have
tried to make sense out of Jakarta's traffic mess have come around to
concur.  Like any
efficiency-based public policy, the challenge is to figure out how to best
redress
the inequities and harm caused.  Making sure good quality motorized paratransit
options (e.g., minibuses and microbuses) are available would help many more 
poor than trying to sustain rikisha and 3-wheeler put-put services.  The
origin-destination
patterns are becoming so scattered in places like Jakarta that even for the very
poor, moderately fast and fleetfooted carriers like microbuses serve most of
their
mobility needs better than becaks or bajajs ever could.  Jakarta's changing
composition
within the paratransit sector itself (from becaks, helicaks, bajajs to
Kijangs and minibuses) reflect
this market dynamic; between 1970 and 1985, before becaks were banned and
tossed into the sea, 
their numbers were already in decline in Jakarta, down some 20 percent.
There are better ways to  
enhance paratransit for the poor -- introducing congestion  charges, higher
registration and 
parking fees, carbon taxes, etc., etc. would yield the funds to provide
special lanes for minibuses,
off-peak staging areas (e.g., as in San Juan, Puerto Rico), and perhaps even
monies for a system of
user-side subsidies. 
   
Inequities have also been redressed by officials not hassling becak drivers who 
stay within kampung borders and don't venture onto busy streets.  The reality,
however, is that Jakarta proper is being gutted  and ridded of its kampungs.
Many of the
poor have been  forced onto the periphery to make way for modern hotel and
office superblocks
housing multinationals and the growing population of elites.  The social
injustices
from banning becaks pale in comparison to uncompensated dislocations of the
poor to
outlying kampungs (where, as I noted, many becaks have also ended up). 

> The oceks are both more expensive and very inconvenient for women carrying
parcels and wearing
>traditional Indonesian clothes. 

When you get to Jakarta, you'll be amazed how many people fit on a motorscooter.
It's not uncommon to find a husband and wife with their two kids and
groceries in tow on a bike.  More
and more ojek drivers, by the way, are attaching side carts for the very purpose
of serving this niche market -- people going from street markets to home.
Regarding
the traditional garb, one rarely sees this in Jakarta -- in a town where MTV
and soaps are a 
stable diet in many households,  the vast majority of women and men I see
are in jeans and slacks.  

>Women particularly feel this reduction in
>their mobility.  They (ojeks) 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.

Every becak driver I've ever met wanted to get out of this back-breaking,
often demeaning line of work.
Becak drivers probably average the shortest life expectancy of any occupation
in Indonesia.  Between the high risk of being hit by a bus, chronic
illnesses (enlarged
hearts) endemic to the job, and the reality of no longer being able to
effectively
compete with other drivers once you've hit 30, the odds against a long,
healthy life -- the last 
numbers  I saw on average life expectency in this line of work was the
early-40s, 
well below the national average.  

>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.  

Yes, the excercise of police power to regulate so as to do what's within the
broader public interest, notwithstanding the fact there are always winners and
losers in the process.

>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. 

This is ludicrous.  Jakarta's building private tollways  faster than any
place, and 
in large part because of the burgeoning middle class that wants to live in
the suburbs, own a car, 
and escape the irritations of the central  city, just as in the developed
world.   Jakarta doesn't have the gridlock 
of  Bangkok or Lagos, though traffic's getting worse every year.  Granted,
if resources (e.g., air, fuel, travel time, etc.) 
were properly priced,  there would be less sprawl and expresway
construction, however the likelihood of this happening 
seems no greater in Indonesia than the developed world. 


> 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.   

This certainly doesn't describe the Jakarta I know (including just having
spent five
weeks there in June & July).  The buses and minibuses are often
packed, and available road space is probably too efficiently used --
motorcyclists
drive on sidewalks, cars spill onto curbsides, motorists inch in to gain
position, etc.  With the 3-in-1 vehicle policy, even the Mercedes and BMWs
traveling 
the protocol roads (like Jalan Sudirman and Jalan Thamrin) are filled with
folks.  As places 
like Jakarta try to retrofit a hierarchy of roads (locals, distributors,
collectors, freeways) into
the cityscape, variations in motoring speeds matter an awful lot toward
maintaining stable traffic flows.   
Road space needs to be rationalized, not fair-shared out to everyone.

>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.

No one disagrees that space could be more efficiently rationalized to reward
higher occupancy vehicles, but what's this got to do with human-powered
becaks and 3-wheel bajajs?


>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.  

No question, graft, corruption, and social injustices abound in Indonesia as in 
many developing countries, but pursuing this line of argument to make sense out
of urban transport policy gets us nowhere.  Wouldn't it be great to change the
world, however there are clear parameters reform-minded folks have to 
work within, and in Indonesia, at least for now, tight-fisted central
control is one of them.   
I don't buy this conspiracy theory, just like I don't buy it as an
explanation for the
automobile's ascendency in the U.S. -- i.e., the contention that General
Motors bought 
up and dismantled the turn-of-the-century streetcars to eliminate competitor
for the ICE automobile,
leading to sprawl, etc.  Indonesia has been one of the most rapidly
industrializing and modernizing 
economies in the world over the past decade, and it's currently
transitioning from the ranks of 
a lower-income to a lower-middle-income country.  The greater force under
way is rising affluence, 
and becaks (along with traditional clothing and many other things) are
getting swept under in the process.
More money in the pockets of average households gets translated into
shifting market demands,
including the demand for motorization.  Debating the effects of
macro-economic changes on the poor in 
the context of becaks, bajajs, and bemos, of course, is rather silly.   Of
far greater concern are 
the problems the poor are facing in terms of adequate shelter, nutrition,
education, and health care.     


>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.

Beyond targetting public works projects, little regional planning occurs in
Jakarta.
Growth is ad hoc, hit-or-miss.  There's simply no notion of spillover
effects or externalities
in the decision of where to site or how to build a shopping mall or housing
complex.  
Public participation would help, but far more important would be actually doing
physical master planning at a regional level -- rationalizing zoning and
land use.  As long
as developers fail to absorb the high social and environmental costs
associated with where
and how they build, inefficient and unsustainable growth will continue.
Places like
Jakarta sorely need programs like impact fees, concurrency rules, adequate
facility
mandates, etc. to force more socially desirable and responsbile patterns of
land development.  
Note, this too involves the exercise of police powers.
  
I'm a strong believer in expanding paratransit, restraining auto dependency,
and designing policies to
help the poor.  And I generally share cause with the environmental
community.  However, I don't
accept that sustainable transport always has to mean embracing NMT, carte
blanche.  This is unfortunately an
arena where all too often there's far more ideology than reasoning.