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Five cities get 21m euro grant to develop public transportation, BRT system
The program will be carried out to reduce the use of personal vehicles, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution.
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Public buses use the dedicated busway lane in Rawamangun, East Jakarta. Five cities including Batam, Makassar, Pekanbaru and Semarang have received grants from Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom to develop Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems. (JP/Ricky Yudhistira)
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ive cities, namely Bandung in West Java, Batam in Riau Islands, Makassar in South Sulawesi, Pekanbaru in Riau and Semarang in Central Java will receive grants of 21 million euro (Rp 326.5 billion) from the governments of Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom to develop Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) services in the cities.
The five cities have been selected by the Indonesian government as pilot cities to develop public transportation called SUTRI NAMA (Sustainable Urban Transport Program Indonesia) and INDOBUS (Indonesian Bus Rapid Transit Corridor Development).
“The program will be carried out in line with our commitment to reduce the use of personal vehicles, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and reduce air pollution caused by transportation,” said the Transportation Ministry’s land transportation director Budi Setyadi during the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) between the ministry and the five regional governments on the joint pilot projects in Jakarta on Tuesday.
The SUTRI NAMA and INDOBUS projects were introduced in 2017 after the Transportation Ministry signed an initial agreement with German development cooperation agency Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), which bridges the Indonesian government and the grant providers.
The projects are intended to develop a more environmentally friendly public transportation system and support development of the BRT as well as BRT line and corridor procurement.
“Basically, in the project, we finance people, we finance activities, and that is to design the BRT system in these five cities. So, all the preparation, all the feasibility is supported by our funds,” said Remy Duiven, the counselor and the head of the Swiss Cooperation Office from the embassy of Switzerland in Jakarta.
However, the project has proven to take some time, as around two years are needed to conduct the pre-feasibility study (PFS), conduct a reality check on several prospective pilot cities as well as select five pilot cities among 25 cities across Indonesia.
