City of Traffic

"Wow! What a traffic!" is probably the words that will come at first, when we see the traffic condition in Bandung. As a part of big cities in Indonesia, especially for Province Capital City, Bandung has a serious traffic problem. For the past 2 years, the condition of traffic here had lead to three major causes, those problems are should be more concerned by the local government.

The first problem we could easily found is, Angkot, a means of transportation that in form of city car. Angkot, as another people mentioned as "City's biggest traffic problem maker" has playing a big role in making the traffic jam in the city, by attempting to pick up passengers at unofficial and unapropriate places. In some cases, angkot will instantly stop at first when they meet a passenger nearby. For such people who in hurry, this will be good so that they can quickly taken to the destination, but how about the others? Common result of this action is a jam. When people are in rush, imagine the effect when this is happend, people will try to slowing down and evade from the line. If you think that it happens only for particular Angkot, maybe you should think twice regarding the number of Angkot in Bandung, it is so enormous, and most of them are doing the same. While bigger number of angkot available is good to provide transportation, such behaviour would make it a big problem.

How about the road?

Now we come to the second important thing, the road. As we can see, people are likely to use their own vehicle rather than public transportation, and because of this, the road is full of cars everyday. While the number of cars is increasing every years, the development of the roadway doesn't has the same trend. The roads in Bandung today is as it was in the past 10 years. This is because the city was designed as a medium-cozy city, with medium road size. When i was in Bandung in 2005, the road was still fit and cars were easily moved. One of the big road called Cihampelas, where there are many clothing store and souvenirs shop, is still available for two directions. 

But when i come back now in 2010, traffic jam is a common view everyday, and the Cihampelas road is now like a small street, even it is for one-way road. If i'm not mistaken, the last roadway development project is the Pasopati Flyover bridge. It was initiated since 2003 as part of inter-city Tol highway project, and finished in 2005. Perhaps it would be one of the solution to the traffic problems, but it seems not giving much help.

The next is, Traffic Lights. Traffic Lights are almost broken and need to be maintenanced. But, as long as i can see, they are not really being carried out a lot. Many broken traffic lights can be found along the main road such as Jl.PH H Mustofa, Jl.Surapati, Jl.Ir. Hj. Djuanda - Dago; Jl. Cipaganti - Dr. Setiabudhi; Jl. Jend. Ahmad Yani; and even Jl.Ibrahim Adjie which connecting Bandung and the sub-city, Kiaracondong. Most of the problems are dead lamps, wrong colors--because of broken electrical circuit inside, and one interesting incident is that there are two traffic lights controlling two opposite directions having the same green light at a time, and each directions are allowed to turn right; so that vehicle from the front direction could be crashed as the vehicles from the other direction wants to turn right.

All of those problems are still happend today, for some reasons, i think maybe the government want to be focus on tourism first, because Bandung is well-known as beautiful city and even called "Paris van Java" where we got everything in Bandung. But, if the city doesn't have a good traffic management, and the road is not supporting enough, soon or later we will find this city as crowd as Jakarta, which had an extremely serious traffic problem compared to nearby cities.

Government should take quick response to this, so we can still have Bandung as Paris Van Java, beautiful, emerging creative city forever.

Iqbal Fathony Ramadhan [110420015]