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Transjakarta plans feeder expansion
Serving millions of trips a year on the many routes it provides, the city-owned Transjakarta Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) service has become an indispensable part of the daily commute for residents in the capital and its suburbs
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Serving millions of trips a year on the many routes it provides, the city-owned Transjakarta Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) service has become an indispensable part of the daily commute for residents in the capital and its suburbs.
Launched in 2004, the Transjakarta BRT — also known simply as "the busway" — served more than 264 million cumulative passenger trips last year with its 3,865-strong fleet, ranging from big articulated buses to micro buses on its 13 main corridors and several subroutes that criss-cross Jakarta.
Amid the company's efforts to spread its service coverage, however, many areas are still not linked to the Transjakarta network, which has deterred residents from using the service.
Tirta Umbas, a 25-year-old office worker who lives in Pasar Minggu, South Jakarta, is one underserved customer. Tirta said he was reluctant to use the Transjakarta BRT for his daily commute to his workplace in the Sudirman Central Business District (SCBD) of South Jakarta.
One reason, he said, was because the nearest bus shelter was 3 kilometers from his house — too far to reach by foot, and a feeder service was unavailable.
“I usually order an online ojek [motorcycle taxi] to get to the bus shelter. However, the rush-hour traffic [around here] is the absolute worst, especially now because of the toll road construction project in the area. So it’s quite a struggle to get to the bus shelter,” Tirta told The Jakarta Post on Tuesday.
He said that because of the project, these days he preferred to take a ride-hailing ojek to the nearest MRT station, around 6 km from his house.
Neneng Rahma Mulyawati, a 25-year-old office worker who lives in Palmerah, West Jakarta, also said she had difficulties in commuting daily to her workplace in Kamal Muara of Penjaringan subdistrict, North Jakarta.
Rahma used Transjakarta's bus service to cover only half of her daily commute, because no feeder service was available in Kamal Muara.
“My office is located in the northernmost area of Jakarta, so it’s quite difficult to find public transportation that can take me [there]. So I usually [take] the Transjakarta bus to Rawa Buaya in West Jakarta, and then complete the rest of my journey, around 6 kilometers, using a ride-hailing service,” she said.
Rahma said while there were privately operated angkot (public minivan) and illegal angkot — basically just minivans with black license plates for private vehicles — she was hesitant to use either.
“It’s kind of expensive to commute using ride-hailing [transport] every day. But I feel like I have no choice — the private angkot take a very long time to arrive, and I don’t feel very safe [about] using the illegal angkot,” she said.
Acting Transjakarta president director Yoga Adiwinarto said that the company had recorded service coverage of 83 percent last year — meaning that 83 percent of the Jakarta population had access to Transjakarta services within a 500-meter walking distance.
“The service coverage target last year was 70 percent, but we were able to reach 83 percent. This year we aim to increase our service coverage area to 85-90 percent,” Yoga said during an exclusive interview with the Post last Thursday. He also acknowledged that there were still many areas in the capital that Transjakarta services had not reached, especially in South Jakarta.
Once the company had achieved 100 percent service coverage, Yoga said, it planned to reduce the distance that potential passengers had to walk to reach a bus shelter.
He cited a study by the Jakarta Transportation Agency that had found that 500 meters was still a long way for most people to walk. The agency had thus suggested Transjakarta to reduce the distance between its bus shelters to 300 m maximum.
Yoga said that Transjakarta was currently focusing on expanding its coverage to the city’s suburbs in cooperation with public minivans under the city’s Jak Lingko single-fare scheme.
“In 2019, we [integrated] 900 privately owned angkot," he said, and that the company planned to integrate an additional 500 hundred angkot.
Transjakarta currently operates 1,723 angkot as the first- and last-kilometer transit service provider under the Jak Lingko scheme.
Yoga said that the angkot service transported a significant volume of Transjakarta passengers, and that the figure had grown exponentially over the past year.
“About 18 percent of Transjakarta passengers came from our minibus [service], and we’ve seen a 329 percent hike in our Jak Lingko angkot passengers from January 2019 to January 2020,” he said.
According to the published data of traffic software company TomTom, the various efforts to improve public transportation have also improved the traffic in Jakarta.
Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan expressed his appreciation over Jakarta’s improved ranking among the cities with the worst traffic in the world, dropping three places each year "from 4th place in 2017 to 7th place in 2018 and to 10th place in 2019," he said.
"Let's #changeJakarta together so we can drop off the list of the 10 ' most congested cities in the world," Anies tweeted on Tuesday.
Still, despite its improved ranking, TomTom records show that Jakarta's congestion level had stagnated at 53 percent since 2018, indicating that Jakartans spent 53 percent more time in their cars than normal.
