Plis Deh Jakarta!

I was always under the impression that the city’s traffic lights, however chaotic, had some sort of outdated underlying system coordinating everything. WRONG. It’s all just random – no wonder we need police officers maintaining the busy intersections at rush hour, or else it would be even worse.

Enter the research arm from UI, assisted by the University of Nagoya, who are trying to figure out on how to synchronize all the traffic lights in Jakarta, in a 4-year project that has started since 2008. They are saying, “synchronized traffic lights could be the answer”. Strangely, the head of the Traffic Management Centre did not know this project was going on.

Well, as long as everybody obeys the traffic lights, we could have a winner here. And that’s even assuming the traffic lights will be on.

Dozens of delman operators have been protesting the decree banning them from operating in the Monas area, where they have been basically kicked out for the last two years. An apparent promise to relocate them to Ancol or TMII apparently was an empty promise.

So why, you ask, have the delmans been banned from the Monas area? According to the mayor, it’s tough washing the horse shit off the park’s stone block, and all the urine and feces made the park all smelly and messy.

So instead of helping the delman operators manage their, um, exhaust better – which I’m pretty sure can be done – the government just cuts them out of their livelihood.

Let’s try to breakdown the logic of this problem:

So 55 five buses for the Transjakarta armada are not operating. Why? No gas.

Why no gas? No money to pay for it.

Why no money to pay for it? The Transjakara general services department has not given the bus operators money to pay for the gas.

Why haven’t Transjakarta paid the operator money for gas?

And that, my friends, is the real question.

So you think those ATMs are built like mini bank-vaults, eh? That’s true, actually; it’s very hard to break in an ATM machine and get all the money out, at least in the amount of time the authorities wouldn’t have noticed. So these guys just took the whole thing so they could pick it apart in peace somewhere.

It’s either that, or they just intend to sell the whole ATM machine to someone…

So not only do we try to plant more trees in Jakarta, but we also put pictures of trees and flowers on billboards.

Similar to the much-hyped Bu Prita versus RS Omni International case, there is another case where somebody bought a shophouse (ruko) from ITC Mangga Dua, in which he was apparently led to believe that he had purchased full rights to the land, when in fact he had only purchased usage rights. After asking for clarity on the issue, he was ignored, then threatened, which led him to write to 2 national newspapers complaining of his case.

He has now been sued by ITC Mangga Dua’s management for… defamation. He has previously lost a civil lawsuit, and now faces the criminal charges.

Hey, we don’t know yet who is right or wrong, but the defamation law is apparently becoming popular…

Two boys sift through discarded waste floating on a river in Jakarta on Friday. (Photo: Adek Berry, Reuters) - The Jakarta Globe

So apparently, Jakarta has won 5 Adipura awards, which are awards issued for environmental awareness. All 5 Jakarta municipalities given the awards were the ones who managed to keep their areas clean, and supposedly being the greenest and cleanest in Indonesia.

Perhaps they kept the streets clean by sweeping everything into the river…