Navigating Space with Poor Signs (1 of 2)

It’s been a while since I passed through Meruya in West Jakarta until the other day when I found that the otherwise straight route now has two additional detours. The first detour enforces vehicles to turn left into a side street right into a housing area and before turning left again to reach the main street. The second detour enforces vehicles to turn left again, makes a U-turn before turning left again to reach the main street. Along with a previously existing detour, now when you passed through the main street, you would have to detour three times with a total distance of a kilometer or two.

I am not going to complain about the shortcut regulations again here. But as I was trying to ignore my growing anxiety of being lost in an unknown area so I wouldn’t lose my orientation towards the main street, it suddenly dawned on me why I dislike detours in Jakarta. It’s because most of them only have one sign pointing towards the direction of the detour, and then no other signs could be found to direct you back to where you want to go in the first place. It wouldn’t be a big deal if the streets are laid out in grid or if you have good sense of orientation. But otherwise, I’m sure you’d agree with me that it’s not easy to navigate ourselves in Jakarta in an unfamiliar area, and especially if there happen to be some detours in the area.

A phrase from Learning from Las Vegas makes perfect sense in relation to this:

“A driver 30 years ago could maintain a sense of orientation in space. At the simple crossroad a little sign with an arrow confirmed what was obvious. One knew where one was. When the crossroads becomes a cloverleaf, one must turn right to turn left, … [but] the driver has no time to ponder paradoxical subtleties within a dangerous, sinuous maze. He or she relies on signs for guidance – enormous signs in vast spaces at high speeds.” [1]

And where are those signs in Jakarta?


Note
[1] Venturi, Scott-Brown & Izenour, "Learning from Las Vegas", MIT Press, 1977:9.

Between Bangkok and Jakarta

As I walked through Khao San Road in Bangkok for the first time, I was mesmerized by the hustle bustle, lively ambience of the street: highly energetic yet relaxed, radiantly foreign yet subliminally familiar. As part of a half-day trip organized by the International Association for the Studies of Traditional Environment (IASTE) conference, I only had a little more than an hour to savor in this exuberance of urbanity. This vivacity, however, occurred only at the street level. Hovering above is the eerily empty old shop houses with dilapidated woods, peeled off paint mixed with layers of dust, one brightly colored billboard sign after another, merging inns, internets, cafes, tours and travels, English and Thai characters, and all the colors and ages of the people walking and sitting idly beneath them.

Granted, this brief observation through a tourist lenses could very well be loaded with urban problems in its day-to-day reality. Nevertheless, a quite thought emerged: architectural design did not seem to matter in urban spaces such as Khao San – or did it? Could this organically, informally created spaces be replicated formally through architectural design, or would such an attempt be labeled as yet another hyper-reality so overly discussed during the IASTE conference?

The day after, I presented my paper about Jakarta: the epitome of a privatized metropolis where long term planning of public amenities are neglected and sacrificed on behalf of short term, high-profit generating projects. In contrast with my short-lived experience in Khao San, my reading of Jakarta presented a grim image of the city divided by socio-economical classes and ethnic groups, disjointed areas and experiences that represented a demarcated society – neglectfully constructed out of casual everyday journeys around the city.

The government-planned public transportation system, focusing more on monumental constructions as means of creating an “imagined community” (Anderson, 1990), could not keep up with the demand of vast urban sprawl and population growth of the city. Instead, the patchy networks of privatized public transportations and the organically developed informal ones took over. For the privileged, the use of private vehicles became the choice, contributing to unnecessary exertion of human energy, economically inefficient traffic congestion and environmentally degrading pollution. The privatized public transportations also catered to more commercially viable areas – neglecting poorer, left over areas of Jakarta.

The informal communities, being abandoned by the formal and privatized systems, had constructed their own networks that to date had not been adequately addressed in planning and design of Indonesian cities and public places. This informal public transportation system, and to certain extent the privatized ones, created a haphazard network with a logic of their own – one that, if only partially and tentatively, resembled a rhizome, or nomadic logic, described by Deleuze and Guattari. They stood in opposition to the state, or striated logic, of the planned and formal public transportation system (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).

How can informal community, system, and network be incorporated in formality of planned and privatized cities when they seem mutually incompatible? What makes one informality, as in the case of Khao San, different from the informality as in the case of Jakarta? What are the contributing factors to successes and failures of informalities? And in what ways do communal values affect the making of spaces and conversely, how could spaces affect the making of communities?

This is the first in a series of posts on my comparative study between Bangkok and Jakarta, initiated by Institute for Ecosoc Rights and funded by UNDP Partnership. See here for Sri Palupi's view of the same topic.

A --> B =/= B --> A

A crop of an ad in Kompas: This is Jakarta!

Travelling time from point A to point B is often not equal from point B to point A. Look at the difference in time between weekdays and weekends!

Regulation of Shortcuts or Shortcut Regulations?

My everyday route around Jakarta includes picking up my sister in Kebayoran Baru area. If you happen to pass this area, you would know that some minor but significant changes have happened in the past month or two. In some intersections one could no longer take a left- or right- or u-turn because the police has constructed concrete portals.

At first it happened only in one intersection that the police might have found to cause traffic jam in the area. Later people (including myself) find another shortcut route that soon was closed off as well. But still we notorious shortcutters find another route that I’m hoping would not be closed off by the police.

For me it’s not simply a matter of finding the shortest possible route that I can pass through without breaking any traffic regulation. Rather, I find that Indonesian traffic regulation attempts to find shortcuts to problems that could not be solved simply by closing off streets and asking people to take a detour instead.

If the last shortcut I take now is closed off, it means that I would have to take more than 3 kilometer detour to travel the same distance. That detour would have added a total of 6 kilometer to my original round-trip route, additional cost for gas at around Rp.2.700,-, and additional 15-20 minutes every day. This is equal to 30 kilometer, Rp. 13.500,-, and 75-100 minutes every week. 120 kilometer, Rp.54.000,-, and 300-400 minutes every month.

This personal cost captures the big loss of Jakarta’s population in general. The Study on Integrated Transportation Master Plan (SITRAMP) funded by Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) estimated Jakarta’s traffic congestion caused the region to suffer annual economic loss in the amount of Rp.3,000 billion (US$ 315.7 million) for vehicle operating costs and Rp.2,500 billion (US$ 263.1 million) for travel time.

All too often temporary solutions are offered to solve problems that in turn create long-term repercussions. Instead of regulating shortcuts, perhaps the police should be thinking about how to create regulations to solve problems in the long-term.

Speed Bumps

My brother told me the other day that he goes through 62 speed bumps during his 23 kilometer route from home to our sister’s office in Kebayoran Baru, to his office in Sudirman, and back home again. That’s incredible! True he goes by small streets, but still! It means on average, for every 370 meters of travel, he would have to pass one speed bump!

I started wondering why this is the case. In my ten years of living in the U.S., speed bumbs can rarely be found along the streets. So how does the police ensure that people don’t speed up in (heavily-populated) residential areas? The answer is because they have traffic regulations in the form of stop signs and speed limits that people actually follow. In Jakarta, such signs can rarely be found. If you ask me why, I would not know the answer.

But signs are definitely much cheaper than speed bumps! If we are skeptical about whether it would work, think about the time when we hear that the police decided to enforce car passengers to use seat belts. We thought that it wouldn’t work. But apparently it works better than expected. Perhaps it’s worth a try with traffic signs – before the bottom of our cars got too many bumps!