With Jakarta recently making headlines for having “THE WORST TRAFFIC IN THE WORLD” (even though that’s not exactly what that report said but whatever…) the pressure is on for the provincial government to do something that can actually make the macet less maddening.

With construction on the capitol’s Mass Rapid Transit System still years from completion,  Jakarta Governor Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama is pushing the accelerator on another traffic measure, the electronic road pricing system, by asking the Department of Transportation to start implementing the system this year.

“I ask that this year [the ERP] must be on its way. By the end of the year it should be [running],” Ahok said at City Hall on Monday as quoted by Kompas. . 
Ahok also asked the Jakarta Transportation Agency to immediately announce a tender for private companies wanting to work on the project. The tender would specifically apply to companies that are interested in running the ERP systems on the two pilot project roads, Jalan MH Thamrin and Jalan HR Rasuna Said, which already have ERP test gates up. 

Two of the private companies that are likely to join the tender are Kapsch, a Swedish company currently testing the ERP gate on Thamrin and Q-Free, a Norwegian company running the ERP gate on Rasuna Said. But Ahok said all companies are welcome to join the tender in the hopes of splitting some of the revenues from the hopefully lucrative and traffic-saving system.

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