Jakarta. Not so fast. Any recent dreams of cruising along Jakarta boulevards swept clear by a relocation of the capital to Kalimantan will likely continue to be just that: dreams.
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| Moving Indonesia's capital from Jakarta would have little impact on the city, experts say. |
International experts in urban planning and policy say moving Indonesia’s capital from Jakarta would have little to no effect on the overcrowding and crushing traffic endured by its residents.
The idea has gained ground in recent weeks, and the government announced last month that President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was seriously considering a plan to relocate the capital, with Palangkaraya in Central Kalimantan and Jonggol in West Java as the two most likely sites. Officials said Yudhoyono’s plan, also floated by presidents Sukarno and Suharto, was motivated partly by a desire to even the disparity in the country’s regional development.
For many Jakartans, though, the big boon would be a freeing up of the crippling traffic, which moves at an excruciating eight kilometers per hour, on average, costing at least $1.4 billion a year in lost productivity. And it will only get worse. The Jakarta city administration has predicted total gridlock by 2012 without drastic action, as the population grows and car sales soar by about 15 percent annually.
But Kenneth Corey, a professor of urban and regional planning at Michigan State University, says moving the capital would be no help.
“I know of no evidence that documents conclusively that traffic congestion is reduced by relocating all or some capital functions out of a national capital,” Corey said. He conducted an extensive study of capital relocations and their implications for South Korea’s now-abandoned plan to totally relocate its capital.
Wendell Cox, an expert on urban policy and transportation issues with the consultancy Demographia, said residents of Greater Jakarta could look forward to ever-worsening gridlock regardless of where the capital was moved. Cox noted that Jakarta, as the nation’s commercial hub, would continue to experience explosive population growth in the coming decades, as well as surging sales of automobiles.
Cox said relocating Brazil’s capital from Rio de Janeiro, Pakistan’s from Karachi and Nigeria’s from Lagos did not prevent those cities from extending their sprawl. He said Rio’s population had tripled since the capital was moved to Brasilia in 1960, while that of Lagos, which ceded capital status to Abuja in 1991, is expected to grow to 15 million by 2025 from an estimated nine million now.
He said the population of Greater Jakarta, or Jabodetabek, which he estimated at 26 million people now, would grow to nearly 40 million by 2050, regardless of whether the capital was moved.
“Based upon the experiences of Abuja, Islamabad and Brasilia, I would be surprised if a new remote capital would reduce Jakarta’s future population by more than two million, and it could be substantially less than that. A megacity of 38 million would be just as unmanageable as one of 40 million,” he said. He estimated that the 40 million mark would be reached by 2030.
Cox stressed that ultimately, while relocating the capital might make Jakarta marginally less crowded and would have other benefits, the city was still destined to suffer gridlock without a massive investment in infrastructure.
“If a principal objective of the capital move is to reduce traffic congestion, then it would be far better to spend the money on the infrastructure needed to do that rather than taking the approach of moving the capital to reduce traffic congestion,” he said.
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