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Jakarta set for 10-year infrastructure boom

The governor of Jakarta has set out a plan to spend $40bn over 10 years in an attempt to make the Indonesian capital a more liveable and efficient city.

Anies Baswedan, an academic and author, said the idea was agreed during a meeting hosted on Monday, 28 January, by Vice President Jusuf Kalla. He added that the money would be found by Indonesia’s federal government and the city administration.

The initiative comes ahead of Indonesia’s general election in April this year. Baswedan was official spokesman in President Joko Widodo’s 2014 campaign.

Key to the plan is improved mobility. Jakarta expanded explosively in the 1960s without proper urban planning, and later versions of the city paid the price in congestion and pollution.

He said in a press briefing: "If we want to be an efficient city, we would need TransJakarta [the city’s bus service] to span 2,149km. Today we have just 1,100km, which means additional buses are required."

"Light rapid transit [LRT] is now only 5.8km long; we need it to be more than 130km long. The MRT is now about 16km long and it has to be built to be 112km long."

Moreover, Anies said there also had to be more than 20,000 public minivans to serve smaller areas.

In the area of housing, he said the city needed 600,000 more units, and had to ensure that all residents were able to access to clean water.

The governor said he had expected to prepare the budget and funding plans within a month with the relevant government ministries.

Image: A traffic jam at Jalan Sudirman in August 2018 (Dreamstime)

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