Dozens of passengers on a cloudy Thursday afternoon disembarked from a train at Gambir Station in Central Jakarta.

In five minutes, the train would then proceed until it reached its last stopover, Jakarta Kota Station, West Jakarta.

Within the brief five minutes, cleaning staff — equipped with dust pans, sweepers and cleaning towels — got onto the train cars to do their jobs before the train departed, needing apparently only two minutes to finish the job.

One of the cleaning staff members, Andika Santun, said that since the beginning of the year, station management required them to clean up every train that arrived at the station. “The rules have been stricter since January, but our job is getting easier because recently only few people litter recklessly,” he said.

Stricter rules on cleanliness from the station’s management might have been triggered by the rapid increase of passengers in Jabodetabek.

Jabodetabek’s train service provider, PT KAI Commuter Jabodetabek (KCJ), also imposes several regulations to keep trains clean. “We hang signage stating the prohibition to litter on trains. In addition, we also do not allow passengers to eat and drink inside [the train],” said KCJ spokeswoman Eva Chairunisa.

The company also deploys its own cleaning staff that cleans the trains right before they arrive at the last station, Eva said.

“We will keep on setting a high standard for the trains’ cleanliness until passengers are accustomed to it,” Eva said, adding that such a standard must be set considering the growing number of commuters in Jabodetabek.

According to data from KCJ, currently an average of 885,642 passengers commute every day to and from Jakarta, Bogor, Depok, Tangerang and Bekasi. The figure is a 40 percent hike from 2015 when 705,556 passengers disembarked every day from five of the busiest regions in the country.

KCJ’s total passengers in a year grew from 121 million in 2011 to 257.5 million in 2015, increasing 112 percent in the course of only four years.

A citizen commuting daily, Mutiara Putri Lestari, said that recently, most of the trains she boarded had shown a favorable level of sanitation. “I have never seen even small [pieces of] trash in trains recently. Maybe passengers have increased their awareness on public hygiene,” said Mutiara.

The 24-year-old employee boards a train every day from Batu Ceper station in Tangerang, Banten, to Pesing station in Grogol Petamburan, West Jakarta.

As people have become more sensible by disposing their waste in the right places, Mutiara said she would feel guilty if she did the contrary.

Another daily commuter, Harish Alfarizi, said that in past months, he also never boarded trains with a dirty interior. “Trains are now spotlessly clean, no one disposes of waste recklessly, even during rush hours.”

Harish, who commutes every day from Duren Kalibata station in South Jakarta to Karet station in Central Jakarta, said cleanliness is one of his personal prerequisites to choosing the train as his regular mode of transportation.

Harish’s view was reaffirmed by social issues analyst Devie Rahmawati, who said that passengers would be more enthusiastic to take the train if it was cleaner.

She added that passengers would be hesitant to litter in a train if it was cleaner. “When the public enters the trains and sees a cleaner interior, most of them would be reluctant to dump [trash] recklessly,” Devie said.

Cleaning services, Devie said, have to be conducted frequently by train authorities so that long-term, the city’s commuters would internalize the state of “cleanliness” into their minds.

“We could take an example from the UK, which made a regulation on queueing in 1930, and revoked it 66 years later after people became accustomed to it,” she said. (adt)

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