Esai / Gerak
Why Carpooling is a Good Option (At Least for the Time Being) for a Less Congested Bandung
Originally published on March 19, 2019.
With the rise in number of car ownership and vehicle miles traveled in cars, traffic congestion is getting worse in many cities in Indonesia, including in Bandung, the provincial capital city of West Java and home to about 2.5 million of Indonesia’s population. To tackle this ever-growing transportation problem in the city, the government of Bandung comes up with the idea to team up with Grab (a transportation network company) and launch a program which obligates government officials and civil servants alike to start using carpooling to commute to work. This program, they claim, will hopefully reduce the number of cars on the road. There is a catch to this, though — they have to use Grab’s carpooling service, “Grab to Work”, which makes use of its ride-hailing service (comprised entirely of, you guess it, private cars), or otherwise they will be fined a certain amount of fee. [1] [2]
The question for this scheme remains: will this actually help solve the traffic congestion problem in Bandung, which by now is way past alarming?
While I may not agree with how this program is carried out, what with having to specifically use Grab (seriously, this reeks of a shady business deal between the government and the company), I have to politely disagree with many of my public transportation enthusiast fellows on their stance on carpooling. Carpooling, in my honest opinion, is a good start towards a less congested Bandung before we fully move on to public transportation. This might sound very pragmatic of me as someone who actually studied civil engineering (of which transportation is a crucial aspect), but please bear with me and let me explain myself first before you jump at me for actually supporting a transportation policy that braces private cars.
As a disclaimer to preface this, though, let me emphasize once again that I’m completely against the decision to involve Grab in this whole scheme because of its many problematic aspects. However, that’s an entirely different can of worms that I choose to not discuss here. Instead, I’ll be focusing more on the advantages of using carpooling to lessen congestion.
In a completely ideal world, people would be walking, cycling, or using transit to move around. Unfortunately, Indonesia is far from what we can call ideal, so there has to be some small compromises before we can achieve that dream. It will take long before Indonesians can adjust to using public transportation like Singaporean or Japanese citizens, and one of the main reasons why it is so hard for us to shift to public transportation is that we are already too used to using private vehicles.
Many of us don’t realize that, for a public transportation system to work in a society where “car driving culture” is already deeply ingrained, there needs to be more incentives for people to actually leave private vehicles before they start using public transportation modes. According to a research by Fearnley et al (2016), attributes relating to car affect public transport demand a lot more than it does vice versa. Which means, people are less likely to leave cars (or private vehicles in general, on that matter) unless there are reasons beyond “decent public transportation”. Just by providing us with faster, cheaper, and more comfortable public transportation isn’t enough to make people actually shift from private vehicles to public transportation. Why so? Because private vehicles, especially cars, offer a number of conveniences that most public transportation modes don’t have.
First and foremost, private vehicles (especially private cars), like their name suggests, provide their users with privacy like no public transportation can. The drawback of being granted the luxury of privacy is that people are used to being individualistic and aren’t trained to empathize with other people. There is a truth in Raymond Bruel’s quote about private cars: “[Cars] keep people from treating other people as human beings. One thinks of passing the car in front of you … instead of passing the person in front of you. Because we don’t understand the humanity of others, there are fewer limits to our aggressive tendencies.” This implies that people who use cars tend to have less patience than those who don’t. For people who are already too spoiled by private cars, it can be hard to deal with having to share space with strangers on public transportation.
Another reason is that private vehicles offer freedom in the form of flexibility. No matter how fast, reliable, and punctual a public transportation mode may be, it still can never achieve this very convenient element of private vehicles. Private vehicles, unlike the majority of public transportation modes, aren’t restrained by schedules. People with private vehicles are free to leave and come back whenever they want. This is why Americans, who pride themselves as people of freedom, especially love cars. As McAllister (2011) puts it, cars represent freedom that serves the whims and changing transportation desires of people, making them the master of their own time. This point feeds into people’s love for instant stuff, for better or worse. The end result? People have less patience to wait. And this greatly disadvantages public transportation.
Lastly, the door-to-door nature of private vehicles also wins over people who prefer things to be super instant. Most public transportation modes require us to make first mile/last mile trips (often also called access trips and egress trips). For some people, this need of transferring from one mode to another can be tiresome, especially if it involves walking. Speaking of walking, it’s easy to blame Indonesians’ reluctance to walk on us just being completely lazy, but if we look deeper into this issue, we’ll see that the lack of decent pedestrian facilities is the main reason why we don’t want to walk in the first place.
Perhaps it’s not a surprising fact anymore that “walkability” (as transportation planners like to call it) in many cities in Indonesia is extremely low. In most parts of Bandung alone, much of the pedestrian pavement is cracked and uneven, on top of the walkway itself being relatively narrow. Trees are getting in the way and sewers are left uncovered. More often than not, motorcyclists will use the sidewalk to avoid traffic jam and car drivers will convert it as a parking lot for their vehicles. It’s even unfriendlier for our disabled fellows. Have you ever imagined using the walkways in Bandung as someone who is visually impaired, for instance? We haven’t even gotten into other safety issues yet, like pickpocket or sexual assault. If only our government paid more attention to pedestrians, I’m sure we wouldn’t mind walking more. And they need to realize that for our people to use public transportation more, we must first provide them with decent pedestrian facilities, because pedestrian facilities play a huge role in encouraging people to use public transportation.
And so that is my take on this whole issue. To sum it up, carpooling is a nice start because, while it doesn’t eradicate all the private cars in the city (that would be too extreme), it nevertheless achieves the short-term goal of reducing the number of cars on the road by having more people occupying each car, thus increasing the occupancy rate per car. That said, the shift to public transportation modes (particularly transit) is still very much needed if we want to go for a sustainable transportation system. So, clearly, we still need to address the issue of public transportation reformation. However, this shift to public transportation can only happen gradually, because for people who are already too used to private vehicles, suddenly shifting to public transportation is too drastic of a change to make for the reasons I’ve stated. In the meantime, people can slowly start adjusting to sharing spaces by carpooling, and we can start reforming our public transportation system (and maybe make cars less attractive by multiplying car tax and/or parking fees) so that hopefully we can make our dream of a more sustainable transportation system in Bandung come true in the near future.
References:
· Fearnley, N., Flügel, S., Killi, M., Gregersen, A. F., Wardman, M., Elise, C., and Toner, J. P. (2016). Triggers of Urban Passenger Mode Shift — State of the Art and Model Evidence, presented at the 44th European Transport Conference, Barcelona, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trpro.2017.07.009
· McAllister, T. V. (2011). Cars, Individualism, and the Paradox of Freedom in a Mass Society. Retrieved from: https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2011/10/cars-individualism-and-the-paradox-of-freedom-in-a-mass-society/#_ftn1
P. S. On the topic of public transportation reformation, my good friend Rizqi Ramadhan talks more in detail about the nitty-gritty of public transportation reformation steps in Bandung and also the problematic aspects of this whole “Grab to Work” scheme. Go check his amazing piece over here.
