Raja H. Panggabean, Jakarta – Piyan is an illegal parking attendant outside the ITC Roxy Mas shopping center in West Jakarta. Every day, he tends an unofficial parking lot for shoppers, located beneath an overpass across from the mall, where the motorcycles are arranged in neat rows.
Piyan says he charges Rp 3,000, or 25 US cents, for a visitor to park their motorcycle for the whole day. "I can make Rp 300,000 a day, but I have to give half of that to my boss," he tells the Jakarta Globe.
Rahmat, another parking attendant in the area, says there are 10 illegal parking attendants staked out around the shopping center, all working for the same boss known only as Dai.
Rahmat says Dai was once a parking attendant himself before he began to employ other people to do the job.
Dai is one of those shadowy figures known as jawara. While in the past the word was used to describe those with a mastery of martial arts, today it is commonly used to refer to thugs who are adept at hand-to-hand fighting – although they don't necessarily shy away from the use of more advanced equipment to support their criminal activities.
In Jakarta, where illegal parking is a massive business, jawaras have long maintained a choke hold on the practice. A jawara like Dai, based on the figures provided by Piyan and Rahmat, can make around Rp 90 million a month from his stable of 10 employees, and roughly Rp 1 billion a year, of which half will go into his own pocket.
The 'partnership'
The late Ali Sadikin, Jakarta's governor from 1966 to 1977, who is widely credited with transforming the capital into a modern metropolis, was quick to notice the jawaras' control of curbside parking, and how there was enormous potential for the city to earn much-needed revenue through the improved management of these unofficial parking lots.
So in the late 1960s, bucking up his courage, Ali approached these thugs and persuaded them to share control of curbside parking in the capital, as well as the incomes generated, according to Agus Prasetiyo, an official at the Jakarta Transportation Office.
Ali's initiative lives on – but with few innovations by his successors and lax law enforcement to keep the partnership in check, coupled with the exponential growth of vehicles in Jakarta and attendant mushrooming of illegal parking areas, the thugs today have regained almost full control of Jakarta's parking business. They continue to rake in the income that should be split with the city administration, while exacerbating the capital's already horrendous traffic congestion by illegally occupying entire lanes of roadway.
Adam Pasuna Jaya, a city official responsible for receiving public complaints about the various problems plaguing the capital, identifies illegal parking as one of the topics that elicits the most complaints from residents, who bemoan the proliferation of illegal parking lots in the vicinity of public buildings such as office towers and malls.
"People are annoyed by the illegal parking. It constricts the road space, and forces vehicles to only use one lane," Adam says.
It's a familiar refrain, according to the Jakarta Transportation Council, or DKTJ, a city-funded think tank, which observes that traffic gridlock in the city has been getting progressively severe over the years. At present, the average speed of vehicles on Jakarta's streets has crawled to a glacial five kilometers per hour, the council says.
Potential lost income
Revenue from the parking business in Jakarta can be divided into two streams: from on-street and off-street parking.
For off-street parking, building administrators are required to pay a parking tax amounting to 20 percent of their income to the city's tax office. So far, this policy has been running relatively well.
On-street parking, on the other hand, has always been a thorny issue. And the complicated bureaucracy has been blamed for allowing the thugs to once again dominate curbside parking operations in Jakarta, contributing to vast potential income losses for the city.
The parking management unit at the Jakarta Transportation Office says it is overwhelmed in dealing with the "organized" thugs controlling Jakarta's on-street parking lots, although some of them have been successfully recruited as official parking managers of many of the lots.
But controlling curbside parking lots without having to pay dues to the city remains a lucrative venture, which makes it a prime target for street thugs, says Syafrin Liputo, the head of control and operations at the Jakarta Transportation Office.
Syafrin says it is quite difficult to eradicate the illegal activity, with the parking attendants always knowing when to disappear during raids carried out by transportation office agents.
"They're pretty organized. I once received a report that at Kebun Kacang [in Tanah Abang, Central Jakarta], they were making a profit of Rp 500 million per year," Syafrin says.
According to the Jakarta Police's traffic unit, the number of vehicles in Jakarta continues to grow rapidly. In 2012 it reached 14.6 million units, before rising by nearly a tenth to 16 million units last year. But the boost in parking revenue from the steady growth of vehicles in the capital has not been commensurate.
The transportation office says parking revenue in 2012 amounted to Rp 210 billion, and increased by some 23 percent to Rp 257.9 billion in 2013 – even though parking fees that year had doubled from the year before.
That works out to the owner of each vehicle paying just Rp 14,365 to the Jakarta administration for parking throughout 2012 and Rp 16,074 throughout 2013, with the thugs running the illegal parking operations taking several times that amount.
According to 2011 data from the transportation office, there are a total of 12,550 on-street parking sites across the capital.
Hendrico Tampubolon, an official with the transportation office's parking management unit, says that given the number of vehicles and parking sites, the city could significantly boost its earnings from parking fees if the illegal operators were bustled out of the business.
Budapest as example
Yoga Adiwinarto, the director of the Institute for Transportation Development and Policy, or ITDP, which has provided technical assistance in the transportation sector to the Jakarta administration for the past eight years, says those figures are far lower than amount in parking fees that motorists spend every hour in cities such as Budapest and London – where the fees are deliberately set high to discourage people from commuting into the city center by private vehicle and instead take public transportation.
Yoga says parking reform is a pressing matter for Jakarta. He identifies parking as an important tool to control traffic, and says it should not just be seen as a lucrative source of income for the city.
"Even when compared with the ERP" – or electronic road pricing scheme – "good parking management will be more effective in controlling traffic jams," Yoga says.
The ITDP, which has been appointed by the Jakarta administration to set up a parking system in Pasar Baru, Central Jakarta, found that motorists would more often than not opt to park by the side of the street, for their own convenience, rather than use a dedicated parking building.
One such building specifically built for visitors to Pasar Baru to park their vehicles has remained largely empty because the parking attendants simply direct motorists to park by the side of the road, Yoga says.
Therefore, there should be a change in the mind-set of the government and people, he says. The government must intervene with a properly thought-out policy. And while the growth in vehicle purchases cannot be stemmed, the increase in the volume of traffic can be offset somewhat with the proper provision of public transportation and good parking management, Yoga says, which will lead to a gradual change in the culture and mind-set of motorists.
He says Indonesia can follow the example of Budapest, which suffered from similar problems when car ownership in Hungary took off between 1985 and the 2000s on the back of an economic boom. To cope with the problem, the Budapest authorities imposed a system of progressively higher parking fees the closer to the city center a motorist chose to park.
Add to this a maximum parking time of just three hours, and eventually the policy proved effective in slowing car purchases and, subsequently, reducing the traffic jams in Budapest, Yoga says. Currently, the majority of commuters there travel on public transportation.
Agus says the Jakarta Transportation Office Agency has often been unfairly blamed for failing to deal with the illegal parking operators and traffic problems. But he says the central government should also be responsible for the issue, by issuing policies to slow vehicle sales.
"Regional governments can only regulate the movement of vehicles, but not the purchasing, because that's the authority of the central government. And one of the causes of the traffic congestion and illegal parking is unfettered vehicle purchases," he says.
Latest policies
The city administration's latest bid to crack down on illegal parking has been to take the matter of law enforcement more seriously. Under a newly issued regulation, the Jakarta Transportation Office has been towing illegally parked vehicles and slapping the owners with hefty fines.
"Previously, transport officials tried to clamp the wheels or deflate the tires of illegally parked cars, but after a policy review [we concluded] that that was not having the desired effect," Syafrin says.
"So this time we've decided to slap a fine of Rp 500,000 per day [for every offender]. Only after paying the fine to Bank DKI will be told where they can pick up their vehicle."
Hendrico says it will take time to eradicate the illegal parking racket, but claims that the policy of towing and fines, which began on Sept. 8, has had a promising start.
"People in Jakarta have proved that the thing they're most afraid of is losing their money, so we'll continue performing this operation," Hendrico says.
He adds the city will also press ahead with its plan to install parking meters, a pilot project of which will be implemented on Jalan Sabang in Central Jakarta.
"We'll have three meters installed along that street as a trial. Later on, people will no longer have to pay a parking attendant, but the parking meter," Hendrico says.
Yoga says the plan to set up parking meters across the city must be done carefully, noting that a similar campaign in Bandung ended in failure.
"The management of parking meters should be handled a competent company. The government should preferably focus on law enforcement alone. Moreover, the role of parking attendants should also be optimized in monitoring vehicle parking hours," Yoga says.
Jakarta Deputy Governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama says that with the new policies, the city is targeting revenues from parking this year of as high as Rp 800 billion, or more than triple last year's take.
Source: http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/news/jakarta/reclaiming-streets-parking-racketeers/