For 22-year-old female student Ricke, safe and comfortable public transportation means separation from male passengers, as she has had several bad experiences involving men on buses.

She told The Jakarta Post on Friday that some years ago when she was standing in a bus heading to her house in Grogol, West Jakarta, from her school in Blok M, South Jakarta, a man who was standing in front of her touched her breast.

“I didn’t know whether he did it intentionally or not, but I could feel his hand on my breast,” Ricke said, adding that it was not her only bad experience while standing shoulder-to-shoulder with male passengers on public transportation.

“I have experienced sexual harassment twice on buses. The experiences are really, really awful.”

To avoid similar incidents, Ricke said she now preferred to take female-only buses operated by city owned bus management company PT Transportasi Jakarta (Transjakarta).

However, Ricke is disappointed with the scarcity of such buses, saying that she needs to wait for up to an hour at a shelter to get one. “If I am in a rush, I will take any Transjakarta bus that passes,” she said.

The same thing was echoed by 22-year-old Transjakarta customer Filzah. She said she liked taking female-only buses because it made her feel more comfortable, but added that she rarely rode such buses because they only served certain routes.

“I usually take Transjakarta buses to Tanjung Priok [in North Jakarta] from PGC [in East Jakarta],” Filzah said. The route does not provide female-only buses.

She added that she had a bad experience once while taking a regular bus. “I had a bad experience when I sat next to some men on a crowded bus. I lost my mobile phone that time,” she told the Post.

A similar incident was also reported by Nur Emilia, a 22-year-old cleaning service worker at a shopping center in the Sudirman Central Business District (SCBD) in South Jakarta. She lost her mobile phone while taking a regular Transjakarta bus from her work to her home in Roxy, West Jakarta, last year.

“That is why I prefer to take a female-only bus if one arrives when I am waiting at a shelter,” she said.

Transjakarta launched two female-only buses on April 21, the birthday of Indonesian women’s emancipation heroine RA Kartini. The buses have provided much needed relief for women who are not comfortable standing shoulder-to-shoulder with male passengers.

In October, the company released an additional 10 female-only buses. All of the 12 female-only buses are painted pink to distinguish them from Transjakarta’s regular buses, whose colors are red, grey and blue.

The buses currently serve passengers along Transjakarta Corridor I from Blok M to Jakarta Kota in West Jakarta and Corridor IXA from PGC to Grogol in West Jakarta.

Transjakarta spokesman Prasetya Budi told the Post separately over the weekend that the company planned to add more pink buses in the near future but he refused to disclose a specific number.

“I hope the plan can be realized next year,” he said.

In recent years, a number of incidents of sexual harassment have been reported on Transjakarta buses and some of them have made their way to court.

In early 2014, for example, the Post noted that a woman reported four Transjakarta employees for sexually harassing her.

The police said the four suspects were charged under Article 281 of the Criminal Code carrying a maximum three-year prison sentence. Meanwhile, Transjakarta said it had suspended the four employees.

Budi said the company was serious about the safety of its female passengers as 40 percent of its passengers were women. The company transports around 345,000 passengers daily on its fleet of 1,200 buses. (vny)

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