“Julie was a really happy girl. She was killed right here,” Brazilian cycling activist Aline Calvacante points to the outline of a cyclist on Sao Paulo’s main street Avenida Paulista in a scene from 2015 Swedish documentary Bikes vs Cars.

The symbol is a way of personifying the death of Juliana Dias, a 33-year-old cyclist who was killed in a traffic incident involving a bus in 2011.

The documentary highlights the most important issue faced by cyclists in a city with notorious traffic: safety.

The concerns are shared by many cyclists in many cities around the world including cities in Indonesia and particularly the capital city Jakarta.

Puput Soedarjanto from urban cycling community Bike2work said that according to data compiled by the group, at least 16 cyclists died so far this year in traffic accidents in several cities in the country while another 15 cyclists were hospitalized. He did not provide detailed data for incidents in Jakarta.

“It indicates that our roads are not safe enough for cyclists,” he said during a recent discussion after a Bikes vs Cars screening at City Hall in Central Jakarta.

Agus Priana, who regularly bikes the 1.5-hour journey from his house in Tangerang, Banten, to his workplace in Kuningan, South Jakarta, said his main concern was safety.

Although he equips himself with a helmet, cycling vest and bike lights, he notices that drivers of motorized vehicles seem to ignore him on the road.

“I have to be careful with motorbikes and cars. Sometimes, all of a sudden, motorbikes get in front of me even on the designated bike lane,” he told The Jakarta Post on the sidelines of the event.

The city administration plans to expand its bike lane network to up to 63 kilometers on several roads across the capital next year.

The Jakarta Transportation Agency has allocated Rp 62 billion (US$4.4 million) for the bike lane expansion. 

The administration aims to eventually have up to 500 km of bike lanes throughout the city.

Still, despite clear signs in place to mark the designated bike lanes, violations are still rampant as motorists occupy or pass through the lanes, jeopardizing the safety of urban cyclists.

In order to improve the safety of cycling in the capital, the city administration has come up with an idea to deploy separators using traffic cones on the lanes.

“Wide roads and roads with at least two lanes traveling in the same direction will be the priority. The point [of deploying separators] is to share space,” Jakarta Transportation Agency secretary Masdes Arouffy told the Post after the discussion.

For narrow roads, bike lanes will continue to be marked with dotted lines.

He added that CCTV cameras would also be installed on roads, as well as traffic signs for cyclists.

“We are studying the locations to install [CCTV and traffic signs],” he said.

The administration is currently conducting a trial for the expanded bike lanes.

The agency, in cooperation with the Jakarta Police’s traffic unit, depends on its manpower deployed on the roads to ticket motorists who drive on bike lanes.

The agency recorded a total of 444 drivers ticketed as of Wednesday. The city administration started to enforce the regulation with a maximum Rp 500,000 (US$35.42) fine on Monday.

The bike lane program was initiated by then-Jakarta governor Fauzi Bowo in 2009, which resulted in a master plan of bike lanes.

His successor Joko “Jokowi” Widodo then issued a gubernatorial decree in 2012 to cement the provision of bike lanes.

Governor Anies Baswedan recently issued a gubernatorial regulation on bike lanes, which stipulates the general requirements for bike lanes and the list of roads on which they will be implemented.

Urban planning expert Nirwono Joga from Trisakti University urged the city administration to evaluate the routes of bike lanes it had developed for the sake of the sustainability of the program. He argued that there should be a study revealing whether they were actually the routes used regularly by cyclists.

“The city administration should have the courage to evaluate the failure of preceding programs. Let’s not repeat the same mistakes again and again,” he said during the discussion.

He suggested the routes used by cyclists might include roads along riverbanks and parks, citing urban park connectors in Singapore, a cycling path network that connects various parks and other green spaces.

“[Urban park connectors] aim for safety and to suppress potential horizontal conflict between cyclists and motorized vehicle drivers,” he said.

In a broader perspective, he said the safety issue was just among a list of problems regarding bike lanes, which mainly originated from the lack of institutional focus by the city.

The rising number of cyclists and scooter users should be managed properly, he said.

“If there is no specialized unit for non-motorized vehicles in the [Jakarta Transportation] Agency, program sustainability won’t be achieved,” he added.

To realize a true cycling-friendly city, Puput emphasized that public awareness about the negative impacts of Jakarta’s notorious traffic should be disseminated, not only the economic losses but also the health threats caused by air pollution.

The Jakarta administration has recently come under fire for the poor air quality blanketing the capital. The latest Air Quality Life Index (AQLI) issued in March by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC), showed that Jakartans can expect to have 2.3 years cut off their life expectancy if 2016 pollution levels are sustained over their lifetime.

The city’s program of bike lane expansion is among the efforts designed to tackle the air pollution issue.

“We should start to promote pedestrian and cyclist-friendly transportation policies,” Puput said.

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