Jokowi Wants 10 Years To Come All Cities Are Congested If They Don't Do This

President Joko Widodo (Jokowi). Photo: Capture Screen/YouTube Presidential Secretariat

JAKARTA - President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) has asked policy makers in each Indonesian city to pay more attention to the provision of public transportation.

According to him, if this is not considered, all cities in the country can experience congestion problems.

Jokowi even mentioned that a series of cities had experienced acute congestion, ranging from Balikpapan, Surabaya, Bandung to Medan.

He stressed that the city's mass transportation plan should be prepared immediately.

Because, by maximizing the mode of public transportation that can transport many people, it is hoped that vehicles on the road can be reduced and traffic jams will disappear.

This was conveyed by Jokowi in the agenda of opening the National Working Meeting of the Association of Indonesian City Governments (APEKSI) 2024 which was monitored via the Presidential Secretariat's YouTube, Tuesday, June 4.

During the event, mayors and regents throughout Indonesia were also present.

"Because if you don't (pay attention to public transportation issues) in the next 10-20 years, all cities will be stuck. Can't believe it? We'll see that cities don't prepare themselves for mass transportation," said Jokowi.

He did not deny that building public transportation so far is not an easy and cheap issue.

Jokowi explained that a series of public transportation in Jakarta alone was built with a budget ranging from hundreds of billions to trillions of rupiah, such as LRT, MRT to high-speed trains.

However, said Jokowi, recently a new mode of transportation appeared which was considered cheaper than building MRT to LRT. The transportation is an autonomous rapid transit (ART), it looks like a train but doesn't use rails.

"There is a new item called ART, autonomous rapid transit. It doesn't use rails but uses a magnet, it can be 3 carriages, 2 carriages or 1 carriage. Well, this is much cheaper," he explained.

For city governments interested in building ART transportation modes, he asked to immediately contact the Minister of Transportation (Menhub) Budi Karya Sumadi.

Thus, there is budget assistance for the city government that is serious about making ART.

"Later, if there is an APBD, you have the ability to contact the Minister of Transportation. You can share, you can, the APBD is 50 percent, the APBN is 50 percent, for example," he added.