Another day, another depressing fact about how terrible the traffic in Jakarta is. Today’s road rage inducing statistic comes from the Central Statistics Agency (BPS) which says that the current average driving speed in Jakarta on weekday mornings is only about 5 kilometers per hour.
To put that in perspective, 5 km/h is also the average human walking speed. Which proves that you could actually walk to work just as fast as if you took a car.
Of course this doesn’t come as a surprise to many of you. In fact, BPS said the average speed data has remained about the same for the last four years (so at least it isn’t getting worse!).
The project manager for the Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) program, Heru Nugroho discussed these figures at a seminar on the MRT’s construction this morning.
According to him, the weekday morning driving speeds in Jakarta were significantly better in the not-too distant past. For example, in the year 2000 a trip from Pasar Minggu to Manggarai would only take about 36 minutes, whereas now it takes about 95 minutes.
Heru said that he hopes that the MRT project will become a real solution to Jakarta’s traffic problems. We hope so too, because its construction is definitely making those problems a lot worse at the moment.
