Taxi services equipped with booking applications are springing up like mushrooms in Indonesia as people are seeking more reliable means of transportation amid the country’s poor public transportation facilities.
GrabTaxi, Uber or even the newly established ojek (motorcycle taxi) app Go-Jek are rapidly spreading in the country’s major cities.
Nadiem Makarim, founder and CEO of the Go-Jek app, said that he came up with the idea to establish Go-Jek in 2011 out of his own need for fast and reliable transportation and also courier services in the capital city.
The company, which was first established to serve Jakarta commuters, has quickly expanded its services and is now also available in Bandung, West Java; Denpasar, Bali; and Surabaya, East Java.
“The expansion is based on the city’s traffic jam level, the supply of ojek drivers and the city’s economic level since our users are from the middle and upper-middle class,” he told The Jakarta Post. “We are planning to further expand our presence in other cities across the country, but we cannot mention the names of the cities just yet,” he continued.
Since Go-Jek launched its mobile app in January this year, its number of ojek partners increased from 1,000 to 10,000 amid rising demand. The app itself has been downloaded 650,000 times since it was launched, Nadiem said.
The marketing head of Malaysian company GrabTaxi’s Indonesian representative office, Kiki Rizki, similarly said that the company’s presence in Indonesia was aimed at tapping the rising demand for safe and reliable transportation in the country’s main cities.
“We see a similar transportation problem in big cities across Southeast Asia. Residents basically need public transportation that can offer security, convenience and speed, which is what we offer at GrabTaxi,” Kiki told the Post.
She said that the GrabTaxi service — which incorporates thousands of selected drivers from five leading taxi fleets in the country and assigns available taxis to nearby commuters using mapping and location-sharing technology — was now available not only in Jakarta but also in Surabaya and Padang in West Sumatra.
The application displays the identity of the driver, the license plate of the taxi that will pick up the passenger and its estimated arrival time.
“By using this application, customers don’t have to worry about being ripped off by taxi drivers, as they can monitor their journey and be informed of the driver’s identity,” she said.
The company also decided to launch GrabBike, which is similar to the Go-Jek service, last month, and had since accommodated more than 1,000 ojek drivers, Kiki said.
Similarly, one of its global competitors, Uber, also does not operate its own fleet. While GrabTaxi partners with official taxi drivers, Uber partners with licensed chauffeur-driven limousine or rental car companies. The operation has been, however, criticized by the city administration regarding its legality.
According to the Castrol Stop-Start Index examining traffic conditions in 78 cities and regions around the globe, Jakarta ranked as the city with the highest number of stops and starts with an average of 33,240 per driver per year.
East Java’s Surabaya was also included on the list, with the fourth-highest stop-start average, reaching 29,880 per year.
Jakarta currently has one rail-based form of public transportation, a commuter train operated by PT KAI.
While the government is currently constructing an MRT system in Jakarta and will soon start the construction of a tram system in Surabaya, little attention has been given to improving city bus management. Metromini and Kopaja minibuses in Jakarta, for instance, are currently owned and operated by private owners, without a united management system.
Transportation Ministry spokesperson Julius Andravida Barata, however, said that the ministry would not legitimatize motorcycles as public transportation, saying that there were no safety requirements regulating motorcycles to serve as a means of public transportation.
“The ministry will not regulate ojek because motorcycles don’t meet the standards for proper public transportation, but we also can’t deny that these mobile applications are emerging based on demand from the public,” Julius said.
“The ministry, in cooperation with the city administration, will try its best to improve city transportation so the public can have reliable public transportation that meets safety standards,” he continued, citing that the management of public transportation, however, was the responsibility of the city
administration.
From the total Rp 64 trillion allocated for the ministry in the revised 2015 state budget, the ministry allocated less than 10 percent or Rp 6.07 trillion for the directorate general of land transportation.
Julius said that the ministry would provide 1,000 buses for Damri and state-run city bus companies (PPD) across the archipelago this year, which, according to him, was part of the government’s support for city transportation.