Tol

Apa yang membedakan Jakarta dengan daerah lain di Indonesia? Padatnya permukiman penduduk? Polusi udaranya yang menyesakkan dada? Itu semua bisa jadi benar adanya. Tapi ada fenomena yang sedang mengubah wajah kota ini menjadi sebuah kota yang sama sekali berbeda dengan sebelumnya.

Coba perhatikan bagaimana Jakarta menyelesaikan salah satu masalah yang terberat dihadapi kota ini: kemacetan lalu lintas. Penyelesaiannya adalah pembuatan jalan bebas hambatan atau kita kenal dengan jalan tol. Mungkin masalah semantik dengan istilah “jalan bebas hambatan” bisa diperdebatkan karena jalan tersebut sebetulnya tidak benar-benar bebas hambatan. Tapi ada hal yang penting di sini untuk melihat sebuah proses Jakarta tidak akan lagi bisa menjadi kota untuk dihuni, namun berubah menjadi sekadar “jalan bebas hambatan”, seperti yang dialami Los Angeles.

Termotivasi pikiran tersebut, saya menulis di koran berbahasa Inggris, The Jakarta Globe, tentang kondisi Jakarta yang lama-kelamaan menjadi kota penuh dengan jalan tol. Tulisan versi web koran tersebut bisa dilihat di sini.


Ini tulisan lengkapnya.



Prabham Wulung

Lessons From Los Angeles Warn of the Perils of Freeways

What kind of Jakarta do you see in the next, say, 10 years? If you asked me, I would say: a freeway city. Yes, there is a phenomenon that will change the face of Jakarta so it will never be the same again.


Look at how Jakarta is trying to solve one of its biggest problems: traffic congestion. The city’s government thinks that the way to solve this problem is to expand the toll roads, which Indonesians call “jalan bebas hambatan,” or freeways. The term “free” may be debatable, as in Jakarta the users must pay and the roads are not free of congestion. But the important thing here is to show how in the future, Jakarta will slowly become a city not for living, but will instead become a “freeway city,” as Los Angeles is.

The term “freeway city” was introduced by Peter Hall in the book “Cities in Civilization.” Hall coined the term “freeway city” for Los Angeles, noting how it morphed from abandoned land in the early 20th century to a megacity filled with cars and freeways in the 1980s.

In 1900, Los Angeles was home to 100,000 citizens, the 279th biggest city in the world. When the city started to grow, the electric light railway was built to replace the horse cart.

Hall wrote that the railway reached every corner of Los Angeles. The system was known as “interurbans.” The system had its golden era in the mid-1920s. The administrator of the system, Pacific Electric, managed the 1,873-kilometer-long network.

Automotive industries were in the spotlight in the 1920s. At the same time, Los Angeles was growing rapidly. Aside from the discovery of an oil field near the La Brea Tar Pits, American entrepreneurs were looking for vast stretches of land for multinational factories. They saw that kind of land in Los Angeles. Big movie companies established headquarters in the city. In short, it was a period of growth for Los Angeles.

The integration of the automotive industry and a growing city created a city that differed from other American cities. The American dream of owning a house in a suburban area and owning a car that could deliver the owner to wherever he wanted to go made private vehicles more common for families in Los Angeles.

Hall stated that in 1930, the ratio of cars to people in Los Angeles was 1 to 1.5. This was compared to the national average of 1 to 5.3. As most residents had cars, developers were determined to build houses further from the central part of town. Before 1914, developers would only develop houses four blocks from a main road, but in the 1920s they had houses 48 kilometers from the city, beyond the reach of the railway.

As cars became the primary method of transportation, the electric light railway lost favor with the residents of Los Angeles. Then the railway company went bankrupt. As some lines were closed down, residents started to depend more on private vehicles.

Cars slowly took over the roads of Los Angeles. This meant congestion. Then came the invention we know now as the freeway. By the 1980s, Los Angeles had freeway networks covering 2,505 kilometers. Basically, Los Angeles was no longer a city, but a series of interlocking freeways.
Every morning and evening, queues of cars lined up along the roads. The freeways no longer worked.

The citizens realized then that the city badly needed a mass transportation system. They resented the previous generation for abandoning the railway system. In 1990, the city administrator started to develop a 35-kilometer railway line connecting Los Angeles with Long Beach.

Jakarta is now on the same track as Los Angeles when it started to think that freeways were a solution. We are starting to become trapped like the people of Los Angeles.

The time we spend on the roads is getting longer — from 36 percent of our time to 67 percent between 1985 and 2000. The city lost Rp 8.25 trillion ($775.5 million) in 2002 because of time spent in traffic jams. Private cars take up 85 percent of the road space, but only carry 9.7 percent of the commuters. The road from Cawang to Gatot Subroto must be widened by up to 36 lanes by 2020 to deal with the potential increase in private vehicles.

Lessons from Los Angeles should teach us that freeways don’t solve the problem of traffic jams. Freeways create traffic jams. In other words, a mass transportation system is the answer.

The citizens of Jakarta don’t want to see the city from behind the steering wheel forever. There is a need to touch people, mingle and enjoy open spaces. We don’t want to see the city filled with drivers and their cars. We want to live in this city, not spend time on its freeways.

Prabham Wulung is an architect and city observer. He graduated from the University of Indonesia and blogs at www.vintage-travel.blogspot.com.