Focussing on plans for modern subways, rapid-transit buses or express trains, while Jakarta delays overhauling its Metro Mini, Kopaja, angkot and mikrolet networks, the administration is just sweeping dirt under the rug.

At a recent meeting with city councilors, Governor Fauzi Bowo proudly reported Jakarta's priority program of continuing to develop the BRT (rapid transit buses) network as well as the proposed subway, but nothing was said about the existing semi-formal modes of public transportation - the "paratransit" system.

Well, pardon me governor, the key to overhauling the city's transportation system lies not in modern technology alone: It is about the addressing the system as a whole, while slowly introducing a new transportation backbone. This involves harmonizing existing means into a working network - not an overlapping one.

Sure, the paratransit system is meant to act as feeder lines for the BRT network, but how?

Jakarta's last effort to synchronize existing microbuses and public minivans involved trying to introduce a single-ticket system for the feeder and BRT buses - an approach that failed not long after its introduction, and which has never been replaced with other initiatives.

They do say that transportation issues have more to do with political tendencies than technicalities.

But what makes it so hard to deal with the existing paratransit system and why does the Jakarta provincial government rather focus its energy in developing the new BRT and subway projects?

Transportation in Jakarta is so tied up with conflicting interests that overhauling it has become extremely complicated.

Officially, it seems non-physical projects such as integrating Kopaja and angkot benefit no one (financially that is) and this is a large part of the reason that the paratransit system is being ignored.

Turning back the clock a little to when the government chose to focus on building roads and highways (one of the consequences of Indonesia becoming a Japanese automakers' production hub), our city buses and angkots were left on their own.

And based on this laissez-faire approach, the industry became highly fragmented. The city transportation agency grants route licenses that are valid for five years; licenses that can be proposed by cooperatives and individuals at supposedly no cost. There is also no tender process involved in granting these licenses, prompting uncontrolled service quality and overlapping routes.

These licenses are then sublet to any interested investors, mostly individual micro entrepreneurs.

As a result of route subletting, one route can involve many individual owners - on average between 20 and 56 individual owners per route.

When the agency tried to include these into the BRT system, it had to deal with hundreds fleet owners, making negotiation process difficult in the effort to find an approach that will work for them to serve as feeders.

There are other issues affecting this challenge. Call them illegal levies, call it corruption, call it whatever you want. Just like any other businesses, formal or informal, public transport operators are interested in minimizing costs and maximizing profits.

As profits cannot be easily maximized due to a tight fare-setting regime, operators seek to minimize costs, which means leaving vehicles under-maintained since it is cheaper to bribe to pass the road-worthiness tests than to regularly maintain their fleet.

The middlemen involved in the road-worthiness test can easily be observed in action at the city's two main test centers in East and West Jakarta. Their job is to "guarantee" that buses pass the test, despite their poor condition.

A relatively healthy bus is levied Rp 400,000 (US$37) and an extra fee of Rp 50,000 exists for each problem found. This illegal income - since the fee for the road-worthiness test is supposed to be only 300,000 for buses and 200,000 for minivans - is shared between middlemen and officers at test centers.

Other costs include illegal levies for the so-called "timers" (people employed to wait at bus stops to inform drivers of how far away the last bus is, or helping to attract passengers) and thugs at bus stations.

These timers are needed because drivers compete with dozens of other buses on the same route. This so called "war for the penny" is also a result of the daily rent policy from bus owners.

Reckless driving prompted by this tough competition creates more problems. But, having their driving licenses confiscated is no problem for drivers, as middlemen paid by route coordinators will bribe traffic police to get licenses back so drivers don't have to go to court.

So far, the official response to all these problems has been minimal, and for as long as it insists on taking this stance, the BRT system will never reach capacity because the feeder network will function properly, and the subway will become mere symbol of modernity.

In the past, Jakarta has seen piles of transportation studies conducted, but these have been sterile from social and political points of view.

While solutions to the issue of corruption bump at the closed gate of "political will", one thing that could actually work to discipline and integrate paratransit system operators is to provide financial incentives and disincentives.

Incentives could be provided in the form of tax breaks for those willing to revamp their old, decaying fleets. The exact opposite - higher taxes based on road-worthiness test performance - could serve as disincentives.

But, again, Jakarta provincial government chose not to increase vehicle taxes, from which it could have created additional cross-subsidy funding, as the number of private vehicles in Jakarta continues to increase.

Instead of only including big bus companies in the BRT consortia, the provincial government could provide a mechanism for individual owners to join hands as cooperatives, which could then obtain shares in a company especially established to deal with the feeder system.

Once in a formal system, these operators would be forced to adapt and become more accountable.

In the process of shaping Jakarta's urban transport network, technological innovations have been key in the forming and reforming of certain groups with certain interests.

Every time a new technology is introduced to Jakarta's transport network, interests change, old alliances break apart and new ones are formed.

But it seems no one is interested in creating a new deal for all the bosses, drivers and timers of our Metro Mini, Kopaja, mikrolet and angkot networks.

The writer is a journalist at The Jakarta Post.

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