A major reason for Jakarta’s maddening macet (traffic) is the number of people who use private cars for their daily commutes. Although the government is finally finishing some long overdue public transportation projects like the Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) system, experts agree that more needs to be done to get people to make the switch.
The Jakarta Government seems ready to disincentivize private car use in the capital by imposing significantly higher parking tariffs in certain areas of the city next year, though just how much higher is still up for debate.
The acting head of Jakarta’s Transportation Office, Sigit Wijatmoko, said that his department was currently working on revising a regulation with the goal of implementing new parking prices at offices and shopping centers along the central thoroughfare of Sudirman-Thamrin in Central Jakarta for next year.
Sigit said that they were considering increasing parking rates in the heavily trafficked area several multiples above the current prices, which range from IDR 5,000 to IDR 12,000 per hour.
“For Sudirman-Thamrin we are considering a price for four-wheeled parking spaces of IDR 69,000, for two-wheeled vehicles it would be IDR 54,000,” Sigit said Thursday as quoted by Warta Kota, adding that those figures were just estimates being studied by his department in discussion with relevant stakeholders.
Sigit also said that other heavily congested areas of the capital might see similarly high parking tariffs applied but his office was still working on a new zoning map for the city to regulate rates by their location.
Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan said that higher parking tariffs would come into effect after the public launch of the MRT in March in order to incentivize commuters to switch from private to public transport. He also said the government would lead the way by no longer giving civil servants access to cheap parking at the city center.
“(Right now civil servants pay parking rates of) IDR 68,000 per month, so all of them take cars. See, that’s the wrong logic, if we want more people to take public transportation, then public transportation should be made cheap and parking private vehicles should be expensive,” Anies said yesterday as quoted by Kompas, adding that the civil servants will have to pay the same hourly rate as other citizens starting on Jan 1, 2019.
While paying IDR 69,000 per hour for parking may seem astronomical to many Indonesians, it is in line with prices in other major cities like Singapore, London and New York where public transport use is much higher.
Traffic experts agree that simply giving people more public transportation options and building new roads are not solutions to congestion in and of themselves due to the phenomenon of induced demand. Both may decrease traffic in the short-term but when road conditions improve many people will feel incentivized to simply go back to private transportation and in some cases this can even exacerbate the problem. So while IDR 69,000 may seem excessive, it’s probably the tariff needed to actually make public transport seem more attractive to a lot of Jakartans.
But if the government really wants to make this plan successful, then they also need to get serious about dealing with illegal street parking, which is rife throughout the capital and run by parking attendants who are generally employed by organized crime groups that take trillions of rupiah in potential earnings from the city. The previous administration tried to combat this problem by installing parking meters in certain areas of the capital but that initiative has been largely abandoned under Governor Anies.
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