While Jakarta’s transportation scene is gearing up for the future, with the construction of the MRT and new roads and flyovers, one mode of transport that’s still largely stuck in the past are the city’s buses.
With the exception of the TransJakarta, which has revitalized its fleet with new state-of-the-art vehicles in recent years, the rest of Jakarta’s buses, owned primarily by Kopaja and Metro Mini, are really old and run down. It’s a miracle that many of them are still functioning.
But the old buses will soon meet their end. The Jakarta Transportation Agency is enacting a plan to have buses that are more than 10 years old removed from Jakarta’s roads by January 1, 2019.
“Our target is for all old buses to be eradicated,” said Masdes Arroufy, head of the Road Vehicles department in the Jakarta Transportation Agency, as quoted by Tempo yesterday.
The 10-year age cap for city buses was introduced in a 2014 regulation, and the city government has been reducing the number of old buses gradually since then.
In 2012, the Transportation Agency said that there were 5,000 medium-sized city buses, like the Metro Mini and Kopaja, in Jakarta, but since the enforcement of the regulation, only 1,200 remain. The Transportation Agency also confiscated 1,600 old buses throughout last year.
Metro Mini and Kopaja buses are privately owned, but the city government has been absorbing many of them into the TransJakarta fleet over the past couple of years with the goal of having the old buses renovated or replaced and used as feeder buses for the main TransJakarta fleet that runs on the Busway lanes.
