A vendor selling Christmas decorations at a shopping mall in Jakarta. - JP
JAKARTA: Millions of Indonesians have begun hitting the road for the Christmas and New Year holidays, as authorities put policies in place for smooth and safe travel.
State-owned toll operator PT Jasa Marga said some 835,000 vehicles have left the Greater Jakarta area from Dec 18 to Sunday for the holidays.
Nearly half of them headed toward Bandung, a popular tourism destination in West Java, and the Trans-Java toll road network, the transportation backbone connecting Jakarta to Central and East Java.
Some 31 per cent were headed to Merak Port in Banten, where people can catch a ferry to Sumatra, and 22 per cent were headed to Puncak, a popular tourist destination in Bogor, West Java.
Authorities will apply counterflow lanes to anticipate congestion on certain stretches of the Jakarta-Cikampek and Jagorawi toll roads, the main routes for cars leaving the capital, from Dec 24 to Dec 29 and on Jan 1, when Christmas and New Year travel is expected to surge.
While packed with cars, traffic along the country’s main toll roads have generally remained smooth, barring a couple of incidents along less travelled routes.
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On Monday afternoon, a bus collided with an ambulance along the Pandaan-Malang toll road, an off-shoot of the Trans-Java toll that connects Pasuruan regency to Malang city in East Java.
According to Jasa Marga, the incident caused some congestion as the flipped-over bus had blocked the toll lanes.
In North Sumatra, flooding inundated a stretch of the Trans-Sumatra road between Labuhanbatu and North Labuhanbatu regencies, causing hours-long traffic congestion that stretched for 15km, Antara reported.
The government and transportation providers have tried to accommodate more travellers and improve travel safety. This includes increasing the number of ferry services to and from Merak Port in Banten and Bakaheuni Port in Lampung, as well as restricting the operation of freight vehicles in an effort to prevent a pile-up in the two ports.
"The Merak-Bakauheni route is one of the most strategic points for year-end holiday travel, so we want to make sure it runs well,” Transportation Minister Dudy Purwagandhi said when inspecting Merak port on Saturday.
Meanwhile, state-railway operator PT KAI has prepared 54 additional mid- and long-distance train services to accommodate over 490,000 more passengers, in addition to employing over one thousand new workers to man the trains and operate the stations.
As of Monday morning, KAI has sold over two millions tickets for train services for the year-end holidays.
Some 800,000 passengers had departed from various stations across Java and Sumatra from Dec 18 to Monday.
Over 72,000 people flew to Bali on Friday in what the Transportation Ministry expected to be the peak of air travel to the holiday island before Christmas.
The ministry is projecting 4.6 million people to travel by air across the country for year-end holidays, a five per cent increase compared with the figure from this time last year.
Transportation expert Djoko Setijowarno said that the government must pay close attention to the safety of travellers, particularly since a majority of the country’s regions have entered a wetter rainy season caused by La Nina weather phenomenon.
“Land travel and train trips that pass through landslide-prone areas must be closely monitored, as landslides are a common occurrence during the rainy season. Safety is nonnegotiable and must be [the government’s] main priority,” he said in a statement on Monday.
The National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB) last week extended a cloud seeding operation to East Java to help mitigate the risks of heavy rain, after previously having done so in West Java and Central Java, where several regions reported flooding in recent weeks.
A recent Transportation Ministry survey estimates that some 110 million people, or 39 per cent of the country’s total population, are expected to travel for the holidays from Dec 18 to Jan 8.
The estimate is about the same as it was last year, when 107 million people were expected to travel.
Private vehicles remained the most popular option according to the survey, in which 36 per cent of people said they will travel by car and another 17 per cent said they will use motorcycles.
Private cars often use the Trans-Java toll road, while people traveling on motorcycles often take main roads connecting cities along Java’s northern coast. - The Jakarta Post/ANN
