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Car owners struggle to find parking spaces
Taking the street: Residents park their cars on the street in Palmerah, West Jakarta, as they do not have sufficient space at home to accommodate their cars
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span class="inline inline-center">Taking the street: Residents park their cars on the street in Palmerah, West Jakarta, as they do not have sufficient space at home to accommodate their cars. On-street parking often triggers complaints from residents and motorists. JP/Awo
Poor public transportation and spatial planning have resulted in a lack of parking spots for private cars and motorcycles in Greater Jakarta.
Hidayat, a civil servant, for example, parks his chunky MPV in a narrow alley in front of his house, which is located in a densely populated residential area in Cinere, Depok, West Java.
Meanwhile, other motorists or motorcyclists are forced to wait behind his car to pass through the alley when other cars or motorcycles approach from the other direction. Hidayat decided to park in the alley as he could not afford to build a garage at his house.
'Building a garage is expensive and would reduce the size of our living space,' he told The Jakarta Post recently.
Hidayat said he was confident that parking his car in the alley would not bother others as he had been granted permission to do so by his neighbors and neighborhood unit (RT) head. 'They say that it is OK as long as I park my car close to my house. There haven't been any complaints thus far,' he said.
Similar arrangements have been made in the busier areas of Jakarta.
Agreeya Natalian, 27, said he usually parked his car in the garage of his boarding house in Bendungan Hilir, Central Jakarta. However, due to a lack of space in the garage, the front part of his car takes up part of the public road.
'The main road in front of my boarding house is quite wide, so I don't think my car disrupts the flow of traffic,' he said, adding he paid Rp 300,000 (US$22.85) per month to a local security officer to ensure the safety of his car.
Agreeya added that as a lawyer, having a car was an indispensable need to support his daily activities, which required him to go from one place to another to meet clients.
Besides taking up space on public streets in business and residential areas, a number of Jakartans also make use of vacant lots or public facilities to park their private vehicles.
Devie, a resident of Tanjung Priok, North Jakarta, said a vacant lot in the front yard of a mosque near his house had been turned into a public parking lot.
'The vacant lot should function as a parking space for people who want to pray at the mosque, but instead it is used by local residents to park their cars,' she said.
Despite limited parking in the capital city, the number of vehicles on the road continues to grow each year. Jakarta Police Traffic Directorate data said that 5,500 to 6,000 new vehicles, approximately 1,600 of which were cars, hit the city's roads each day.
The data also said that by the end of 2014, there were 17.5 million motorcycles, 3.2 million private cars, 673,661 freight cars and 362,006 buses in Greater Jakarta.
Urban analyst Nirwono Joga places blame on poor urban planning.
'With the current situation, people will find it easier to move from one place to another by car or motorcycle instead of taking three or four different forms of public transportation to reach their destination,' he said.
He added that people also used private cars so they would not have to sit through traffic in a packed public bus.
According to him, the city administration could encourage residents to shift to public transportation by improving it and boosting integration.
'Such effort will take some time, but it is possible to do,' he said.
