Picture taken from my house of the road next to Pacific Place mall.

This is the day when I was stuck in traffic for more than an hour when it normally takes 5 minutes. This is the day when some students arrived home past midnight. This is the day when you can say Jakarta’s traffic is just more than a nightmare. I have lived in Indonesia for almost exactly 16 years and have never in my life experienced traffic this bad. It seems like traffic has gotten noticeably bad just recently. The reasons for this are increasing population and the slow process of highway construction on a regularly used road. Firstly, Indonesia has the 4^th largest population in the world with most people living in Jakarta so although the city is already overpopulated, more people are having children for population growth and more are migrating in. Thus resulting more cars and more motorcycles. Secondly, JL Antasari, a long road where traffic is bad, is under construction which reduced from 4 lanes to 2! Therefore the traffic is worse also affecting many other roads. It is not the fact that they are renovating the road that is the problem but the fact that the process is too slow.

I think Jakarta’s future will be something like the picture shown where you will be stuck everyday especially worse after raining. However to reduce this there are some possible solutions to the present problems. For overpopulation, the government can limit the number of immigrants. For the second problem, the workers can speed up their process by working at night too. Although that may disturb people’s sleep for some time, I think they would prefer that to suffering in the car from traffic. The government says it will take around 1 year to finish the highway above JL Antasari but in my opinion with that slow process, it will take 3 years. However with suggestions above, Jakarta’s traffic wouldn’t be as bad as today in the future.