[sustran] becaks & bajajs

[Dinesh Mohan]

I am touched by Mr. Cervero's concern for the health of becak drivers in 
Jakarta.  All of us who have so much concern for the health of the poor 
in this world should also think now of banning construction of higways and 
expressways.  I have never really met a man or woman who would not like 
to escape the drudgery and back breaking work at road construction 
sites.  After we have done that we could proceed with banning iron ore 
and bauxite mining as the miners also live and work in horrible 
conditions.  While we are at it we should also consider banning 
construction of houses and factories.  Construction workers have the 
highest accident rates and can't think of working beyond the age of 40.  
Sustran has its work cut out for a long time.  I hope we can do this 
quite efficiently.

					Dinesh

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Professor Dinesh Mohan                  	Office: (91 11) 685 8703
Coordinator, Transportation Research         	      & 666 979 Ext 3161
& Injury Prevention Programme,              	 
Head, WHO Collaborating Centre,   		FAX:    (91 11) 686 2037 
Indian Institute of Technology, 			      & 685 1169
New Delhi 110016, India
				  
E-mail: dmohan at cbme.iitd.ernet.in		Home:   (91 11) 649 4910

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On Fri, 19 Sep 1997, Robert Cervero wrote:

> 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.
> 
> >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.     
> 
> 
> 
>