Map & Sense of (In)security

Last Sunday, I was invited to be a guest on a radio talkshow at Radio Utan Kayu with Dahlia Citra, host and producer of "Cuma Perempuan". The talkshow highlighted the issue of public participation in urban planning in Jakarta, particularly on Jakarta's transportation. One of the listeners commented that she was afraid to take the public transportation because of the lack of security.

I too am afraid of taking Jakarta’s public transportation. The only time I tried to take it on my own was to go to a friend’s house which isn’t too far from my own. That one experience leaves a particular memory in my mind. Although I know the direction and the area (I normally drive), I had no idea which public transportation I should take, and I was feeling insecure. I didn’t want to ask a stranger on the street. So I asked the driver of the public transportation instead, which was no help, because he was more eager to have me on his angkot than letting me know which one I should have taken. At the end, I had to transfer three times to travel a distance of less than 8 kilometers in total.

This feeling of insecurity could have been reduced if I at least have a map on my hand, telling me which public transportation I should take. As part of a research I did for IASTE conference, my research assistant Bevani found out that the reason why such a map does not exist in Jakarta is because Jakarta’s Transportation Department (Dephub) does not even have such a map. Bevani found that public transportation routes in Jakarta was not established by the government, but rather, by private companies that proposed these routes to the government. Later when we mapped public transportation routes around South West Jakarta, predictably, most started or ended in commercial and/or residential areas and routes that are populated, creating routes that resemble a rhizome rather than one that create a coherent whole.