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Editorial: Early as birds
It is embarrassing that the Jakarta city administration has eventually chosen to "sacrifice" hundreds of thousands of school children to ease the burden on city roads after its half-hearted efforts to address acute traffic congestion have got nowhere
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It is embarrassing that the Jakarta city administration has eventually chosen to "sacrifice" hundreds of thousands of school children to ease the burden on city roads after its half-hearted efforts to address acute traffic congestion have got nowhere.
Jakarta Deputy Governor Prijanto said recently that starting Jan. 1, all schools across the city are required to start half an hour earlier at 6.30 a.m.
Many have questioned the policy as it will only force children to go to school earlier at the expense of their rest time. There is also doubt as to whether the proposed policy can actually help solve the problem.
According to Prijanto, the policy is based on a recent survey, showing that about 30 percent of all journey destinations of urban travelers apply to school children. The change in school hours is therefore expected to reduce traffic during the period concerned by up to 14 percent.
We hope that before enforcing the new regulation, the city administration will consider various aspects including its potential effectiveness in dealing with the problem. A further survey may be needed to ensure that the policy will not end up being useless.
According to the survey, school children and teachers contribute daily some 30 percent of the trips in the capital. But do all those school students significantly contribute to the traffic problem? How many of these students, in reality, have been contributing significantly to the traffic problem?
Only senior high school students, who are allowed to hold driver licenses, may drive to school themselves. The rest of the students go to school, either sharing with their parents' cars, or in groups using monthly paid vehicles, or by public transportation, or on foot for those whose schools are only walking distance from their homes.
The proposed change of school hours, therefore, may not only be ineffective, but also unfair to the great majority of students -- mostly elementary school students -- who do not contribute to traffic congestion, but will still have to "sacrifice" their rest time to go to earlier classes.
Another question is: Why does the city administration come up with this conclusion? Is it because they have already given up on their other attempted solutions to ease the traffic, so they have finally chosen an apparently easy way out -- by shifting the hours of school?
We believe that there is no instant way to address traffic problems. Therefore, we hope that the city administration will be more serious in developing better public transportation options because this is the only realistic way to deal with this.
The call on motorists to shift to public transportation will never be effective as long as there is no reliable and convenient public transportation. Policies like imposing electronic road pricing (ERP) on certain roads and higher parking fees will become acceptable if there will be alternative transportation available to motorists.
It is therefore regrettable that Governor Fauzi Bowo has so far failed to provide the much needed buses to serve the already constructed and available 10 corridors of the TransJakarta busway. The city has failed to deploy a single bus to the last three corridors, whose construction was completed months ago.
The bus shortage is the key to the failure. It not only worsens traffic congestion because private vehicles cannot pass through many of the unused busway corridors. It is also inefficient because the investment in this public transportation infrastructure, funded with taxpayers money, is rendered useless, just like the unused concrete stumps for the monorail. The administration needs to focus on this problem.
In the long run, there are many ways to ease traffic congestion. One of them is for the city administration to locate favorite state schools in suburban areas, or to persuade the private sector to do likewise with popular private schools, so as to site schools in areas which do not have traffic problems. This will automatically cut down the number of trips by school children.
Telecommuting may be another way to cut the number of trips in urban areas. Thesedays, many kinds of jobs can be done from home. With this system, some office workers can do their jobs without making trips.
If many companies develop this system, it will be a big contribution towards easing urban traffic congestion because currently office workers contribute 32 percent of the Jakarta traffic.
However, for the time being, improvement of public transportation remains the only sustainable choice if we want to ease traffic congestion. The city administration should focus on this rather than simply "sacrificing" our children.
