Speed it up!: President Joko âJokowiâ Widodo, accompanied by Cabinet ministers, monitors the first underground drilling works for the MRT project at the Pemuda Statue area in Senayan, Jakarta, on Monday
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President Joko 'Jokowi' Widodo said on Monday that delaying the rollout of infrastructure projects would only see their construction and overall costs get more expensive.
Speaking at an event to mark the start of underground drilling for the mass rapid transit (MRT) project in the Pemuda Statue area in South Jakarta on Monday, the President said that the MRT was one such vulnerable-to-cost-increases project, as quoted by Antara.
As an example, Jokowi said that if the MRT project had been conducted 26 years ago, its construction costs would have been cheaper. 'Its land clearing costs would have been much cheaper. We also would not have had to demolish the Lebak Bulus Sport Stadium because it would have been designed [to allow for the MRT] from the start,' said the President.
Jokowi said that delaying the MRT's construction caused technical and non-technical costs for the government to get higher, causing overall costs to become much more expensive.
The President said previous administrations had delayed their decisions about the MRT project as they had been calculating profit and loss only.
'A public transportation project will never be profitable,' said the President. Rather, he said, it was the benefit that the MRT project could have that had to be considered. 'It will benefit the country, the people living near it and the city as a whole,' said Jokowi.
The President claimed that the MRT project was locked in while he was serving as Jakarta governor on Oct. 10, 2013. 'It was a political decision. There were protests against the project but I decided to continue with it,' he said.
PT MRT president director Dono Boestami said the MRT project had been running for two years, starting from its groundbreaking ceremony by then Jakarta governor Jokowi on Oct. 10, 2013, to the land drilling stage inaugurated by the President on Monday morning.
'It won't be easy to reach completion on the current stage because this project, a large scale public transportation project, in Indonesia, is facing huge challenges,' said Dono.
Regulations, construction stages, tree relocations, green-space clearing, public facility removal and traffic engineering were among the challenges faced by the project, he added.
Dono said the first phase of the MRT's north-south corridor (Lebak Bulus-Hotel Indonesia) was now 30 percent complete.
'The project's flyover structure is 18 percent complete while its underground structure is 43 percent complete,' he said. He was optimistic that the MRT project would be completed on time at the end of 2018, when it will hopefully resolve transportation and gridlock problems in Jakarta. (ebf)
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