Street for Pedestrians (Opinion)

A pedestrian is a person who travels by walking or running on foot. A street for pedestrian has many terms, such as pedway (pedestrian way), sidewalk, path walk, side street, pavement or pedestrian street. In Indonesia it is called “trotoar”, for this writing let us use the term pavement. In other countries, especially in developed countries, the proper pedestrian street is one of success the indicator’s for citizen’s mobility. These facilities are made as convenient as possible. There is a clear path for pedestrians. By this, the vehicles must respect the pedestrian as long as the pedestrian obeys the rules. How about in Indonesia, do we have enough pedestrian facilities? Or does the pedestrian have their right for good access and walk comfortably in our city’s street? 

Walking is the cheapest transportation option, and also benefits your body. But in Jakarta, people prefer to go to their activity places by car, motorcycle, taxi, bus, or ojek. Beside the long distance, they don’t want to walk in Jakarta because the pavements are terrible. The pavement are not fully dedicated for pedestrians but also the trees, potted plants, signs and markings, sometimes there is a hole for the drainage system. Sometimes, the development does not respect the right of pedestrian. They use pavements to fix the drainage under it, by demolishing the drainage several times and after that the surface of pavement gets worse. This is annoying and uncomfortable. Plus, the motorcyclists and the illegal shoppers use the pavements too. This makes the pavement’s functions vanish. The changed of pavement into the ladder for cross bridge to busway station, is another problem too. By this conditions, the pedestrians have to give up and being second user and under-appreciated. In fact, the pedestrians are the hero of the environment because walking pollutes less. In an attempt to reduce emission and carbon footprints, the government should encourage built development that support pedestrians. But the reality is different.

Government has developed the infrastructure such as road, highway and flyover that dedicated most for vehicles. They also support automobile procurement from a financing scheme. Then the results are more traffic jams and pollution, such air pollution and noise, especially in the big cities. People spend a lot on their money, time and their health. By looking at these facts, now is the time to give the right back to the pedestrians. The local government must put in more effort to create walk able streets. For example, in Thamrin-Sudirman Street, the local government of DKI Jakarta has been trying to fix the face of the city since the leadership of a new leader. They fixed up the pavement surface, and also put the street’s accessories such as benches for city beautification and bollard to protect pavement from motorcyclists. By this approach, pedestrian get their right.

In fact, not all the citizen work in the protocol road, there is still a lot of people who work in arterial or collector roads which needs attention from government to improve the pavement. So, government has to put comprehensive planning to encourage pedestrian and take back the function of pavement for pedestrian. Meanwhile, there is one group of walking supporter who wants to socialize and support walk ability in Indonesia. The website’s name is www.jalan-kaki.org which launched in the Habitat’s Day 2013, three weeks ago. They found that sometimes our citizen only could accept the existing pavement because they didn’t know the correct one. Maybe for people who have visited others country for example Singapore, they will protest with our pavement condition. So, “jalan-kaki.org” has been trying to raise awareness about proper pavement to promote sustainable development in Indonesia. 

Even though the facilities for pedestrian are not sufficent enough, but at least there is a class action’s group who will fill the gap of our development. By awareness of the citizen and action from government, the nation puts a big hope for better Indonesia in the future. 

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