Viral: Netizens praise motorcycle taxi driver for opening up path for ambulance to get through traffic jam

Jakarta’s infamous traffic is a huge inconvenience to most people living in the capital, but for those with a medical emergency that need to be rushed to the hospital, the macet can be fatal. While high-level politicians often use police escorts to take otherwise illegal shortcuts through traffic jams, Jakarta’s tiny, overworked fleet of ambulances routinely get stuck while trying desperately to get medical emergency victims to the nearest hospital.

Seeing an ambulance unable to make its way through the traffic is an alarming, depressing sight. Which is why netizens are heaping praise on a motorcycle taxi driver, who appears to work for online ojek service Go-Jek from the jacket he is wearing in this viral video, for creating a path for an ambulance to make its way through the macet.

This young man helped open the path for an ambulance that was trapped in severe congestion in the Kasablanka area. You are the best

The video was shared by Drama Ojek Online Indonesia (@dramaojol), an Instagram account that usually shares people’s bad experiences with online ojek drivers. The video was posted yesterday and has already been viewed over 130,000 times.

Over 800 netizens have commented on the video, with most singing the ojek driver’s praises, although some noted that the other drivers in the video shouldn’t have needed anybody to push them to make way for the ambulance.

In an excellent but depressing piece about Jakarta’s ambulance response infrastructure published last year in Foreign Policy, journalist Jonathan Vit notes that Jakarta’s Emergency Ambulance service (AGD) only owns 43 ambulances but has to cover a city of about 10 million people. Average ambulance response times are about 10 minutes in America and 7 minutes in Japan, but in Jakarta that number is a frightening 37 minutes.



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