If you can afford a car or motorcycle, you’d better be able to afford a garage to house them in. That’s the message from the Jakarta Transportation Agency after they announced that they will direct their efforts towards enforcing a regional bylaw requiring privately owned vehicles to be parked inside a garage.
“(Those who don’t have a garage) aren’t supposed to be eligible for an STNK (vehicle registration certificate). But if they get an STNK regardless and they park their car on the side of the road, we have to tow that car,” said Jakarta Transportation Agency Head Andri Yansyah, as quoted by Kompas yesterday.
The law, which forbids privately owned vehicles to be parked on the side of the road (even in residential areas) and forces potential car buyers to show proof that they have a garage to house vehicles in, was actually introduced back in 2014. However, it has obviously been rarely enforced considering how many vehicles in Jakarta are still parked on the side of the road (often because one household has multiple vehicles but only one garage).
“If you want to buy a motorized vehicle, like a car, you must have a garage. (If you also want) a motorcycle, then your house should have two garages if need be, not 4 to 5 vehicles to one house,” said Jakarta Governor Djarot Saiful Hidayat, as quoted by Kompas.
As we’ve come to expect, traffic law enforcement in Jakarta can’t be on the look out for every single kind of traffic violation every single time due to a lack of manpower or… inefficiency. Instead, traffic crackdowns often appear to be nothing but PR-motivated knee-jerk reactions to hot button issue, such as the recent widespread crackdown on motorcycles illegally driving on sidewalks, which will likely soon to be replaced with another seasonal violation crackdown and therefore are unlikely to have any kind of lasting effect on the behavior of motorists in the city.
