What is the most famous thing in Jakarta?
Monas? Lots and lots of shopping center? Heat? The people?
You can say a lot, but Jakarta is actually quite famous for one thing.... TRAFFIC JAM!
That and also corruption, but let's talk about the traffic jam.
In most country, there's rush hours, usually start in the morning and in the afternoon, can go for about 1 - 2 hours.
However, in Jakarta, there's no such thing as rush hours because ALMOST every hours is rush hours.
Let's see....
7 - 10 is the Morning rush where everyone head to the office, school or college.
12 - 2 (sometimes 3) is the Lunch Break, where a lot of people went out of the office to the nearest shopping center to buy food and most of them are taking either taxi or private car.
Traffic jam in Jakarta demand your patience and your ability to drive.
There are motorcycles who likes to slip between cars, private cars that keeps on switching lines and also bus.
One of public transportation that I use the most is Transjakarta, who copied the mass transport system in Bogota, Colombia.
But don't compare those two together because Transjakarta aren't even near of those in Bogota...
Now, taken from Wikipedia...
"During rush hours, people from upper or middle classes (one of the main targets of TransJakarta) usually prefer to use private cars or taxis to avoid inconvenience of the overcrowded Transjakarta buses even though they have to bear with traffic jams instead. Many passengers are thus lower-middle-class people who are ex-users of other less comfortable and/or more expensive commercial buses.
This situation is at odds with one of the initial objectives of TransJakarta which was to reduce traffic jam during rush hours by persuading private car owners to use comfortable public transport."
That's right, Transjakarta's is supposed to be for the upper or middle class.
But hey, who could blame those upper / middle class that refused to use Transjakarta when you know what Transjakarta is like...
