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View all search resultsProve the ground first
Before chasing air-taxi pipe dreams, Jakarta must fix the fiscal cracks beneath the 11 million commuters relying on Transjakarta every day.
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Passengers ride a Transjakarta bus traveling through the Hotel Indonesia traffic circle area in Central Jakarta on June 21, 2026. (JP/Iqro Rinaldi)
P
T Transjakarta turns 22 this year. Over those two decades, it has expanded from a modest fleet on a single corridor into a mass network that handled 329 million passenger trips in the first nine months of 2026 alone.
For an agency tasked with instilling a public transit culture in a city choked by private vehicles, that is no minor feat. Ambition was never the bottleneck, and Jakartans have earned their pride in the orange, and now blue, fleet.
Jakarta Governor Pramono Anung’s plan to extend Transjakarta across administrative borders into Greater Jakarta, particularly toward Bekasi, West Java, where some of Southeast Asia’s most grueling pre-dawn commutes originate, is the right move. Functionally, Greater Jakarta operates as a single megalopolis. Administrative boundaries may demarcate municipal jurisdictions, but they mean little to the 11 million commuters crossing them daily.
The Bekasi corridors currently in service represent some of the network’s most vital recent additions, with more in development. These cross-border riders deserve the same frequency, headways and reliability enjoyed along inner-city trunk routes.
Talk of helicopters, however, belongs to a different conversation entirely.
Pramono has floated helicopters and urban air taxis as prospective components of Transjakarta’s long-term portfolio, citing New York City as an aspirational benchmark. At least one urban mobility analyst rightly pointed out that "it makes no sense to deploy helicopters as mass transit," an assessment that is hard to dispute. In Jakarta, private helicopter charters start around Rp 32 million (US$1,789) per hour; Transjakarta charges Rp 3,500 per passenger.
The governor may entertain visionary concepts, but conflating them within the same fiscal reality is indefensible. His administration would be better served confronting the structural realities of institutional finance.
