Editorial: Park your cars at home

"Shift to public transportation or pay a high price” was the message from the Jakarta city administration to motorists when it announced a plan to increase parking fees by up to 400 percent.

It is really an unwanted New Year’s gift for private-vehicle owners because they cannot easily pick any other available choice.

The quadrupling of parking fees is a cause for concern for most of the private cars users in Jakarta, although in other metropolitan cities around the world, fees are far higher. On the other hand, shifting to public transportation is not a comfortable choice either, due to the poor standard of services on most modes of public transportation.

The city plans to introduce a parking-fee zoning system as part of integrated efforts to ease traffic congestion on the grounds that the city’s roads can no longer accommodate the number of private vehicles, which increase by an average of 200 cars and 1,000 motorcycles per day.

Under the new system, parking fees in busy areas, designated as Category A, will jump from Rp 1,000 (11 US cents) to Rp 4,000 per hour, while in less crowded areas, fees will be double the current rate of Rp 1,000.

The new parking-fee scheme is expected to come into force in the New Year, provided the City Legislative Council approves it.

Increasing parking fees is a bold measure that could help to address daily traffic congestion, after previous traffic restriction initiatives, like electronic road pricing (ERP) and vehicle restriction based on colors and registration plates, failed to win adequate public support.

The city really needs to come up with a breakthrough to solve the gridlocks that have reached an intolerable level. Congestion is not only a source of daily frustration for road users, but it also causes energy inefficiency and exacerbates air pollution. Therefore, any initiative to ease this problem deserves public support.

But questions linger over the effectiveness of the new parking-fee scheme. The three-in-one vehicle restriction policy in major thoroughfares could be a lesson learned. It has not worked well since its inception 16 years ago because motorists found a loophole: they can hire “jockeys” to comply with the policy rather then leaving their cars at home.

There is no easy answer to the chronic traffic congestion. We believe that continuous improvement of public transportation services is the only plausible way to lure motorists to leave their cars parked at home, rather than trying to force them to do so by trial and error.

The Jakarta government needs to focus more on the improvement of public transportation, which could be achieved by deploying more Transjakarta buses, providing additional train carriages onto the rail networks and accelerating the construction of the mass rapid transit (MRT) system, rather than imposing traffic restrictions.