It took me 1 hour and 15 mins to fly from Singapore to Jakarta. It took me 2 hours to travel from the airport to the hotel which is located at the Central Business District via taxi. It took me 6 and a half hours to travel from Jakarta to Bandang in my brother-in-law’s car.
It is amazing to learn that an average Indonesian spends so much time on the road. Take my brother-in-law as an example, every morning at 7, he drops off his girlfriend at her workplace. Then he took another one and a half hours to get to his workplace, which according to him is very near to hers. I really think that the Indonesia government should do something to stop wasting her citizens’ precious time.
Can you imagine how much an Indonesia can do with all these unnecessary travelling hours? He or she could learn something, enrich thyself, spend more time with friends and families, push the economy by spending more time and money in the mall … anything but getting frustrated in the car accepting such a horrible transport system. Cynthia told me that if by 2005 the government does not do much to overhaul the road system, the average speed in town will be 10 km per hour. Oh God.
Back to the 6 and a half hours roadtrip to Bandang, first I saw police car openning up the opposite lane so that my direction of traffic became a one-way dual lane road. Nice. But what happened to the traffic on the opposite lane? To my surprise, all the cars from the opposite lane were just waiting in front of a police blockage. I must have seen miles and miles of traffic all waiting for the police to re-open the lane. Does this really solve any problem at all?
And after some detours and some ferocious overtaking made by my brother-in-law, we were met with traffic at a crawling speed. In fact, I would say three quarter of the entire road journey was commutted at a crawling speed.
At the end of the jam, I have discovered that in this one lane that take us from Jakarta into Bandung was nothing but a T-junction (I was kind of thinking that it was a stupid traffic light that slows down the traffic). And in this T-junction, there was a big jam to the left and the road to the right was wide open (we headed right). Basically, cars that intended to turn left at the T-junction blocked all the traffics behind including those that wanted to turn right.
Duh!