Traffic misery : We are not moving anywhere

Traffic misery : We are not moving anywhere Yohanes Paulus Bisma ; The writer has just graduated from Temasek Junior College, Singapore, under the four-year ASEAN scholarship for Indonesia

JAKARTA POST, 12 Januari 2013

Traffic jams have become a new norm in our capital city, Jakarta. It is a sad reality that Jakarta commuters have to be used to spending hours on the road every single day. The problem with the traffic in Jakarta is multi-faceted. It’s an egregious reality, a chaos that arose from three main causes, one entangled with another: The excessive number of motorized vehicles, the inefficiency of current anticongestion measures and the absence of long-term infrastructure such as the Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) system and the monorail (which was abandoned, leaving its platform supports as mere concrete pillars). One might attribute cause number one to the rise in middle-class consumers in Indonesia. It is, indeed, a natural economic phenomenon.  With people earning higher incomes than before, the demand for motorized vehicles naturally increases, leading to a surge in the number of vehicles moving in and out of the city every day. However, let us look deeper into the case. We might ask ourselves, shouldn’t the government intervene?  Unfortunately, the government’s neoliberal approach to the economy, which was adopted in the New Order era under Soeharto, is still deeply entrenched in our central governance today and worsens our capital city’s problem. As quoted from David Harvey, the author of A Brief History of Neoliberalism: “Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets and free trade.”  The policies that our government set into place follow suit: Publicly owned state enterprises were privatized, trade barriers have been removed and capital markets were deregulated and so on. Perhaps the various investment incentives, slack regulations and the selling of leases on our national assets that were intended to boost our economy in the 1970s have backfired.  Blatantly disregarding the negative externalities caused by these economic activities, our central government has allowed companies to exploit the lack of regulations here in our country. It has led to massive deforestation all over our country.  It has led to exploitation of our mineral resources, with the case of Freeport still echoing in our memories. Now, in the absence of government intervention in our automotive market, car sales, too, are uncontrollable. Every month, an Astra dealer reportedly has a target to sell 200 motorized vehicles, and as of March 2012, there were 227 dealers across Indonesia. You do the math. And Toyota is not the only automotive brand around. Another report says that Jakarta City Police has to release 1,000-2,000 vehicle ownership letters (STNK) daily, and for the record, Indonesia is third only to the US and China in terms of use of motorized vehicles.  Looking across the sea, one country has been largely successful in solving its traffic congestion problem, if one has ever existed, despite only having 710 square kilometers of land.  On the roads of Singapore, even those in its central business district, traffic gridlock is still a rarity even as its population has grown to more than 5 million today. The success of Singapore’s traffic management program lies in its forward-looking and bold government. In its early post-independence days, the government realized that smooth traffic and an efficient public transport system was essential in ensuring a working country.  The result was the implementation of the vehicle quota system, which limits the number of cars in the country through the number of certificates of entitlement (the price of which has skyrocketed to S$71,000-S$150,000, depending on the type of car).  In addition to the ownership tax, the implementation of the electronic road pricing plan (likely to be implemented in Jakarta in the future), in which prices fluctuate with the volume of vehicles entering a certain district, adds a substantial burden to the commuter that increases with the usage of private vehicles. This makes owning and using a vehicle very costly in Singapore. While we can foresee fierce waves of protests happening here in Jakarta if the same programs are implemented, life goes on for commuters in Singapore despite the hefty taxes as a well-maintained, world-class public transport is readily available to serve as a substitute to private vehicles.  The Circle Line was completed earlier this year as the nation’s fourth MRT line, while the construction of its fifth is currently ongoing. Bus services, run by two private companies, SBS Transit and SMRT, are becoming more efficient too, due to “for the market” rather than “in the market” competition. The courage to make unpopular decisions as well as foresight are lacking in our government. They have had it wrong since day one. The government has chosen a path into the traffic deadlock that we have each day in our capital city. The pro-market policy has definitely taken its toll.  Leaving the private vehicle market unregulated has kept the number of cars in the city surging with increases in demand. In contrast to the hefty taxes that are imposed on vehicle owners in Singapore, credit schemes are readily available here in Indonesia by companies such as Federal International Finance (FIF). Worse, rumors say that the problems of congestion and inefficient public transport have been intentionally ignored by decision-makers due to intense lobbying by the automotive industry. So, is the government not making serious efforts in tackling this issue to keep a smooth flow of profits into the pockets of car companies? Maybe.  Even without this intense lobbying, the incentive of higher tax revenues from these companies that are enjoying higher sales would already be a good motive to keep delaying the progress of our public transportation system. The point is Jakartans need a government that functions: One that is not half-hearted in tackling the problem of traffic congestion, one that is bold enough to move toward a greater level of interference in the market and one that will free itself from businesses that only have their own profits in mind.  We need a government that realizes, in line with the Tinbergen Rule, we can never find a single all-cure to our multi-faceted traffic problem.  We need a government that will stop wasting its budget on partially effective, short-term traffic measures (and perhaps in the process slotting a few million rupiah into their pockets, too) and start working on a long-term and well-developed public transportation network. Perhaps we will find this under the new leadership of Joko “Jokowi” Widodo and Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama. Their plan to finish the construction of the monorail and to finally construct an MRT line in the city would be a breakthrough and a huge step toward alleviating congestion in Jakarta.  Let us hope that in addition to their plans, they will also be able to intervene in the automotive industry and move away from the strong neoliberal culture of our economy.  If that does not happen, we will never move anywhere. ●