Hop on and find enlightment!

The Jakarta Post, Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Some people are sensitive to the social problems around them. For most of us, though, current events are just words on paper or images on TV that have very little effect on our everyday lives.

Consider trains, for example. How many of us have ever bothered to look beyond the annoying delays they cause us in our cars or buses?

We look at the beat up old carriages, with people sitting precariously on the rooftops and hanging out the windows. But do we see the vibrant community that goes on inside these carriages, or how people’s livelihoods are tied to them?

I didn’t. Not until recently when it stopped being convenient for me to take the bus to work, and the train became my only refuge from monstrous taxicab fares.

I commute on the Jakarta-Rangkas Bitung route, on which there are several types of trains: the clean, air-conditioned express trains that run only in the early mornings and early evenings, the not-so-clean electric trains, and at the bottom of the ladder, the diesel trains.

The diesel trains are relics from the 1960s. Their carriages are filthy with decades of unwashed dust and rust, their broken wooden seats lack covers, and their spit-lined floors could use a good scrub.

For the first few trips, these were the only things I noticed. That’s probably because I was too busy clutching my bag to my chest and making sure my cellphone was still in my pocket.

But as soon as I relaxed, I found a whole different community.

There were no electric lights, so glimpses of the other lives on the diesel trains came by way of passing vendors with their candles.

There are vendors for anything imaginable. Thirsty? There are cold drink vendors, hot coffee vendors, and peddlers of energy drinks and jamu (traditional herb drinks).

Feeling a bit peckish? Just wait, and soon food vendors will come by offering Sumedang fried tofu, tape uli (sticky rice eaten with fermented black rice), pempek and otak-otak (two styles of fish cake, one eaten with soy sauce and vinegar, the other with peanut sauce).

If you want to sample foods from other regions of Indonesia, there are sellers of sweet oranges from Pontianak (West Kalimantan), salak (snake fruit) from Bali, salted goose eggs from Brebes (Central Java), and small limes to make Manado’s (North Sulawesi) famous dabu-dabu chili.

Need some glue? There are vendors selling it, as well as those peddling scissors, nail clippers, energy-saving light bulbs, plastic combs, children’s activity books, ballpoint pens, and hair clips.

For entertainment, prepare to be amused by child buskers singing the latest top 10 songs from the Indonesian charts, blind singers with their tape recorders around their necks, and young men with an ensemble of guitars and a home-made portable drums. You might even see a monkey act complete with drums and gongs.

These people offer their goods from carriage to carriage, often greeting regular commuters in friendly tones, or even rough banter.

And what of the passengers? Here are some snatches of overheard conversation to give you an idea:

“You should go to Achong if you want a mikrolet license, he knows the ropes, he can get you in no matter how glutted the route,” advised a middle-aged man with a tummy.

“The boss really relies on Tuty, that’s how he is, once he feels he can trust someone, he just leaves office matters to her entirely,” a lady in a neat blazer and skirt said to another woman.

“There’s a dangdut show at Pondok Ranji tonight, looks like good business if I go, there’s bound to be lots of thirsty people,” a man with a bucketful of iced drinks said.

“She can’t hear us, what’s the girl listening to, I wonder. Hey, do you think I could ask to take her home?” a young man asked his smirking friends.

“I never said I’d get you in trouble, you’re like my brother, you took care of me on the street, I’d never do that to you,” said a dirty-faced boy with a crew cut.

It doesn’t matter that passengers often need to ride on the roof so as not to be late for work, or that accidents often happen due to faulty equipment, or that the trains are often delayed.

At only Rp 1,500 (about 17 U.S. cents) a ride, the trains provide the most affordable means of transportation into Jakarta for these people. For some, it’s the only affordable means.

Taking the train was an eye-opener for me. Never again will I complain of delays when the railway-crossing gate closes to let a train pass. After all, it may mean someone’s livelihood for the day.

Is there any light at the end of the tunnel for the railways?

The Jakarta Post, Saturday, March 4, 2006

It is not that they do not fully grasp the dangers; people riding on the top of railway carriages do it out of desperation, transportation experts say.

“So far, there are no alternatives for a low-cost, long-distance mass transportation system, other than the economy trains. So, more often than not, people have no choice but to ride on them,” Indonesian Transportation Society chairman Bambang Susantono told The Jakarta Post on Friday.

Rail transportation is the cheapest means of getting around in the city. A mere Rp 1,500 (about US$0.16) takes a passenger from Rangkas Bitung in West Java to Jakarta, a distance of about 80 kilometers.

It is also the most efficient, as it is able to transport 10 times the number of passengers per hour than Jakarta’s other transportation systems.

At peak hours, office workers, street musicians, beggars, traditional market vendors and transvestites sit side by side. But, for the city’s poorest people, even Rp 1,500 is considered steep.

“You need only ride on an economy train — on any route, at any given hour — to get an idea of the demand for rail transportation. Take the Rangkas Bitung route, people always have to resort to carriage roofs because there’s no room inside,” the director for the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) Indonesia, Darmaningtyas, said.

Moreover, officials of the railways — particularly on the Jakarta-Rangkas Bitung route — collect tickets in a random fashion. A passenger without a ticket has two options: Slip the fare to a slaphappy conductor or enjoy a free ride.

Which is where the problem lies.

“The government is obliged to subsidize economy-level services, so that access is granted even to the underserved. But the government never gives enough to PT KAI (state railway) because it considers the management has not done enough to draw earnings from passengers,” Bambang said.

If all train passengers bought tickets as they should, PT KAI earnings would surge by 20 to 30 percent, he said.

Darmaningtys, who is also the director of the Institute of Transportation Studies, does not see a solution in sight.

“Unless there’s greater political will to fix our rail system, the government must pay the full subsidy, because that’s its duty. On the other hand, PT KAI must also clean up its act,” he said.

With the government subsidy and increased revenue, the railways could upgrade its carriages and engines.

“It’s high time for PT KAI to modernize its armada — both its long-distance and short-distance economy trains,” Darmaningtyas said.

The company’s long-distance economy trains date back to the 1960s, while the short-distance trains were procured secondhand from various countries.

The greatest agents of change are the passengers themselves, but unfortunately Indonesian passengers are passive in this respect.

“They act like how the railways operates is none of their business,” Darmaningtyas said.

We are dealing with individuals who hurl rocks at passing trains to smash the windows in, or dispose of their trash on the carriage floor or obstruct a door so it jams.

“I can’t understand it either,” he said.

Lessons learned from Asia’s three MRT systems

The Jakarta Post, Friday, 17 February 2006

The experiences of three major Asian cities indicate a mass rapid transit (MRT) system will not work effectively unless there is great political will to integrate the system on a level playing field with cars, buses and other rail projects.

“Powerful leadership is needed to plan, think through and execute the plan,” a World Bank transportation expert, Jitendra N. Bajpai, said at a discussion Wednesday, citing Lee Kuan Yew and Nikita Kruschev as the figures behind the success of the Singapore and Moscow metros, respectively.

Bajpai — part of a team studying urban rail concessions in Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Manila for the World Bank — said many of the failures in implementing MRT systems in these three cities derived from failed complementary actions, or unrealistic targets.

“Some expected the MRT systems to solve congestion and to improve public transportation across the board, without the complementary policies that are now recognized as necessary. These expectations were unrealistic,” he said.

Transportation policies should provide a level playing field for all transportation modes through tax/subsidy and regulatory measures, otherwise MRT benefits suffer and government funding support is higher than it should be, Bajpai said, explaining that this happens when cars or buses are subsidized or when competition is not regulated.

People also need to access the MRT by other transportation modes, therefore a failure to set up seamless transfers contributed to the fact that the MRT systems in the three cities failed to get car owners to switch to the systems.

“If you had a car, would you leave your car and use the system, knowing that you needed to make so many transfers? You wouldn’t do it, unless the transfers were very well done,” Bajpai said.

So far, the most successful of the systems is Bangkok’s 23-kilometer BTS skytrain, operating since 2000, with a ridership of 15.2 passengers per kilometer in a city of 10 million, 53 percent of whom use public transportation.

Manila’s 11 million population brought in only 15.6 passengers per kilometer on its 24-km LRT III system, in a city where 72 percent of the population uses public transportation.

Other systems — Bangkok’s Blue Line subway (18 km) and Kuala Lumpur’s Star (25 km), Putra (24 km) and Monorail (11 km) — each attracted fewer than 10 passengers per kilometer.

While all of these systems began with private concessions — in the hope of avoiding the need for public funding — most projects did not achieve the financial returns forecast, and were taken over by the government, Bajpai said.

“Because an MRT system is expensive — you can’t just leave off once the project has started, meaning that the government needs to take over,” he said, citing the Star and Putra lines in Kuala Lumpur.

Learning from the experiences of the three cities, Jakarta should try to address its transportation problems in a way that it can most afford, and not rely solely on private concessions because a strong government role is still needed to make the system feasible, Bajpai said.

“What happens is that people are attracted to a certain system without looking at how it can solve the problem. The solution is brought forward first, without looking at the problem,” he said.

In every step of planning and execution, public consultation and transparency should be emphasized, and the government’s focus needs to be on creating a sustainable MRT system, rather than on implementing an infrastructure project.

For Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Manila, “it’s a tale of winners and losers, and in the end the winners are the users — but not the poor people because fares are high — and the losers are the government, bankers and investors”, Bajpai said.