Traffic In The City

A glimpse of traffic in Jakarta

It’s the time of the year again when I am spending my lunar new year in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. Like many previous visits, I am still amazed with its traffic and people’s attitude towards living in the most crowded city in the country.

Getting around from one place to another can be exhausting at times, as the traffic tended to be heavy and chaotic. It’s not unusual to see all kind of vehicles gradually slow down to a crawl and sometimes a complete halt for a considerable amount of time. As I sit back in the car when this happens ‒ watching it slowly inches forward, I can’t help but feel that my time is ticking away wastefully.

I often wonder how does people cope with this kind of traffic when they commute ‒ a kind of traffic that didn’t seem to be improving at all, days after days. Have they became numb and resigned to the fact that the problem proved to be too complicated for the authorities to do anything effective about it?

I guess one factor that is causing this is the lack of reliable public transport. Inconvenienced by lack of it, people choose to drive their own cars and motorbikes. Another factor could be personal safety as stories about petty crimes like theft of personal belonging or money on crowded public bus are often heard.

But ultimately, I guess, is the attitude of the road users which can be rather indifferent at times. Take the other day when I passed by a three-way junction near Sunter. The road along the junction is quite narrow, barely enough for two cars to safely pass each other but shared with vehicles from both directions. With the absence of traffic light, cars, trucks and large swarm of motorbikes moved from and to all directions, occupying every inch of the asphalt. Cars were moving very slowly and whenever some space widen up a bit around the cars, motorbikes rushed to fill it, making the road difficult and dangerous to manoeuvre.

Even worse was at center of the junction where vehicles tried to push through but were met with drivers from opposing ends who were unwilling to open the road a bit to let them pass. The whole scene was alternating between standstill and slow moving.

Looking back, the ones who are affected the most by this kind of unsystematic condition are the road users themselves. In a sense, it’s akin to them inflicting their own wound and if nothing changes, they would be the ones to continue to suffer on the road.