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akartans have given a low job approval rating for Governor Fauzi Bowo and his deputy Prijanto, especially in their handling of Jakarta’s perennial problems involving traffic congestion and flooding, a poll has determined.

The survey, conducted by Lembaga Survei Nasional (Median) and Lingkar Sejahtera Jakarta (LSJ), revealed that more than 70 percent of respondents have given Fauzi and Prijanto a failing grade in their handling of traffic management and flooding in Jakarta.

The survey found that 76.61 percent of respondents thought that Fauzi and Prijanto did a terrible job in reducing congestion in the city, while 73.2 percent considered they were doing a poor job in handling problems associated with floods.

Only 29.4 percent of respondents said that the administration under Fauzi had performed well in providing decent public transportation, the pollsters said in a statement made available to The Jakarta Post on Tuesday.

For the survey, Median and LSJ interviewed 975 Jakartans, selected through a multi-stage random sampling process between June 10 and 15. The margin of error for the survey is estimated at 3.2 percent.

The administration, however, received a higher approval rating in its efforts to provide public service and sanitation. In terms of public service, 33.4 percent of respondents thought Fauzi had done a good job. On sanitation, the approval rating was only 41.4 percent.

“The governor’s weakest performance was on public welfare, one of three fields studied in the survey. The other two fields were administrative services and the economy,” researcher Rico Marbun said in the statement.

The city administration said that the survey could serve as an impetus for improvment.

“If the research institutes carrying out this survey are credible, we can consider their findings motivation for us. However, I do not know if [the findings are] politically motivated,” administration spokesman Cucu Ahmad Kurnia told the Post.

Cucu said that the city administration had done its best to improve life in the city.

“The governor does not do this alone. He has so many subordinates in many agencies working together for the city,” Cucu said.

Fauzi told reporters last week during a press briefing that his government faced tremendous challenges in handling flooding and traffic problems, arguing that Jakarta had seen increasing demands, which grew faster than the government’s capacity to deal with them.

Fauzi said that flooding and congestion required long-term comprehensive efforts that might span the next five decades.

The city is planning to provide a high-capacity public transportation system in the form of the mass rapid transit (MRT) project and adding more bus rapid transit (BRT) routes to help address transportation needs in the near future.

Jakarta is set to begin work on its first-ever MRT worth a total of ¥144 billion (US$1.78 billion) next year.

Work on supporting the East Flood Canal and repairing dozens of damaged areas on the city water channel network are also underway. The canal is expected to be able protect around 3 million citizens from annual floods and the anticipated five-year flooding.

With a population of more than 9.5 million people and around 28 million in the satellite areas of Bogor, Depok, Tangerang and Bekasi, Jakarta is one of the world’s so-called “mega-cities”.