A step in the dark: Jakarta seeks order for its crazy pavements
Pedestrians in the Indonesian capital run a gauntlet of gaping potholes, wayward noodle stands and lecherous men – if they can find a place to walk in the first place. But change is afoot: welcome to Orderly Pavement Month
As his company of police officers assembles for the morning muster in West Jakarta, falling into 27 rows of roughly eight men deep, Budhy Novian, chief of law enforcement for Jakarta’s municipal police, considers the day ahead.
Soon, Novian, 43, will climb into a Ford sport utility vehicle and join a motorcade of about two-dozen police vans, flatbed trucks, tow trucks and cruisers on patrol for shops and vendors encroaching on the city’s scare public space. But after a month, the show of force seems little more than keeping the ocean back with a broom. The futility is beginning to show.
“If we put a police officer there, full time, the area will stay clear,” Novian explains.
“As soon as we go away, they will be right back.”
Welcome to Orderly Pavement Month, thought to be the capital’s first sustained effort at laying claim to its meagre bits of common space all in an effort to make one of the more congested and least livable cities just a little more pleasant.
Since late July, the dragnet, which wrapped up on Friday, and was undertaken by local and national police has snared 8,000 violators, confiscating noodle stands, gas canisters and other equipment which the owner can get back for a small fine.