A

survey conducted by the Thomson Reuters Foundation in cooperation with online pollster YouGov says Jakarta has the fifth-most dangerous transportation system for women in the world.

The Jakarta Transportation Agency has promised to evaluate the system, but says it is difficult to regulate public transportation outside the management of the Transjakarta bus service.

Agency head M. Akbar said over the weekend it was difficult for his agency to control the operations of Metro Mini and Kopaja minibuses or angkot (public minivans).

He said his agency would change the business plans of non-Transjakarta public transportation, so their safety and security standards would be the same as Transjakarta'€™s.

In the last few years, several gang rape cases have occurred in angkot.

The Transjakarta system is safer but is not necessarily without incident. Earlier this year, four Transjakarta employees were found guilty of harassing a female passenger after she fell unconscious due to an asthma attack.

The survey shows Jakarta has fallen behind other Southeast Asian capitals like Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok and Manila.

The survey questioned 380 to 513 women and at least nine women'€™s rights and gender experts in each of the 16 most populous cities.

According to the survey carried out online from Aug. 27 to Sept. 8, the poll found that women had little faith that the authorities would investigate if any women were to report harassment or an attack.

They ranked Jakarta the fourth-least reliable in terms of law enforcement.

Other cities included in the survey were Buenos Aires, Paris and Moscow.

Akbar said he appreciated the survey, saying that the result would drive his agency on to improving public transportation in the city.

Akbar said his agency had made several efforts to minimize the number of harassment cases on public transportation, especially on Transjakarta buses.

'€œEach bus has CCTV and a security guard. We also separate the passengers, the males are in the back while the females are at the front of the bus,'€ he said.

National Commission on Violence Against Women (Komnas Perempuan) chair Yuniyanti Chuzaifah said many cases related to sexual harassment still occurred on public transportation.

'€œThe number of reported cases is small but we are sure that the number of occurrences is much greater than that,'€ she said.

Yuni said Komnas Perempuan had asked the authorities to revamp the transportation system and provide an online complaint center for victims to direct their complaints to.