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View all search resultsA canal could rethink Indonesia’s supply chains
The Cikarang Bekasi Laut was built to carry water. But it has always had the potential to carry something more.
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Containers are loaded and unloaded at Tanjung Priok Port in Jakarta on Feb. 4, 2026. (AFP/Bay Ismoyo)
There are moments in a nation’s journey when solutions do not need to be invented, only rediscovered.
For decades, Indonesia has tried to solve its logistics problem in the same way: by adding more roads, more trucks and more capacity onto a system that was never designed to carry the weight placed upon it. The result is familiar, congestion that does not ease, costs that do not fall and uncertainty that quietly defines how the economy moves.
Perhaps because the issue has never been distance. It has always been design.
On paper, trucking from Cikarang to Tanjung Priok appears efficient, with market rates ranging between US$110 and $140 per Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit (TEU). But logistics is not measured by motion alone. It is measured by time, and more importantly, by the reliability of that time.
A journey expected to take two hours routinely stretches to five or six. When hidden costs are accounted for, the real economic cost rises to $140 to $180 per TEU.
The system is not cheap. It is simply mispriced.
Along the northern edge of Java, a canal runs quietly toward the sea, the Cikarang Bekasi Laut. It was built to carry water. But it has always had the potential to carry something more: certainty.
