[sustran] Re: Indonesia's traffic nightmare

[John Ernst]

Toyota has long led the automobile market in Indonesia with the 
locally manufactured 'Kijang' utility vehicle.  Yamaha dominates the 
more rapidly growing motorcycle market, with Honda catching up from a 
later (local manufacturing) start.  (So, yes, it is not coincidental 
that most of the plans for Indonesian highway expansion are developed 
with assistance from JICA.)

Several Indonesian NGOs lobbied for an improvement in the 
transportation bill as it was reauthorized this year, and the article 
posted represents the general disappointment at lack of progress -- 
and regress concerning requirements for the physically challenged.

Note that the 'expert' calculation of total gridlock for Jakarta in 
5-years is based simply on projecting vehicle registrations against 
square meters of road space and noting that Jakarta will be able to 
fill up every square meter of road space by having every car owner 
come out at once and park on the street.  Not exactly an 'expert' 
analysis, but it was successful in giving the media a handle on the problem.

The figure was probably initially developed to lobby for more road 
construction, but has been equally effective at pointing out the 
hopelessness of trying to build enough roads to keep up with motor 
vehicle growth.

What is not noted in the article is that the current, sub-optimally 
implemented, BRT in Jakarta uses road space about 8 times more 
efficiently than car traffic (roughly 4000 vs 500 passengers per hour 
per direction at peak hour) .  There is potential to double the BRT 
efficiency fairly easily, meaning adding 1 lane of BRT equates to 
adding 16 lanes for cars.  Although Jakarta has over 100km of BRT 
operating, its poor quality implementation has kept it from catching 
the imagination of the press.  A good lesson for other cities.

Best,

John Ernst
Vice Director, SE Asia
ITDP - The Institute for Transportation and Development Policy
Promoting environmentally sustainable and equitable transportation worldwide
www.itdp.org


At 07:42 PM 6/28/2009, Todd Edelman, Green Idea Factory wrote:

>Which automobile makers are among the most active in Indonesia? Or 
>with the highest sales?