Letter from Indonesia: motoring, mysticism and a modern wonder

Jakarta, Rabu (Wednesday)

Motorscootering around fair Ibu Kota requires a set of highly refined skills. It also has an air of mysticism about it insomuch as I have noticed that each journey has its lessons, as if the gods of traffic had decided on a curriculum that must be continually revisited.

For example, today’s lesson was non-motorised vehicles. Barely out on the main road and I encountered the first lot of said vehicles in the form of a line of three food carts or kaki lima making their orderly way along the side of the road between the cars and the kerb. No passing was possible until we reached, at walking pace of course, the wide open spaces of the intersection with traffic lights. And so, a lesson in patience.

Taking off from the lights, I accelerated around a corner and was about to whizz past on the right of the mini-bus in front to the stretch of rare empty road beyond when I noticed the bus driver’s arm flopping out the window and waving downwards, the universal sign to slow down, now! I hit the brakes just in time to weave around a cart filled with gas bottles that was being pushed straight across the road as if the chap was blind. Lesson in not speeding and assuming the road ahead is clear.

About 300 meters ahead the same lesson was reinforced but in a different way. This time, the teacher was a becak or tricycle rickshaw driver who was seemingly parked but who suddenly turned and pushed his vehicle straight across the oncoming traffic (me) in order to, presumably, turn around and head back into kampung. I curled around him and his machine and on to the next challenge a kilometre or so up the road amidst lanes of banked-up traffic: a bicycle, crossways between two cars as the old gent on it nudged his way out into the other lane of traffic in the time-honoured tradition of traffic creep. I nearly removed his front wheel as I went past.

The lesson yesterday was to do with pedestrians, who appeared from nowhere, from all directions, in all shapes, sizes and amounts from individuals to a gang of school kids. They leapt out at me from sidewalks, from behind cars and trucks and apparently from the ground itself; they suddenly stopped when they should have been continuing to walk or walked suddenly when they should have stayed stopped; and they split into stragglers from a conveniently rounded-up mob, providing plenty of opportunity for slalom motoring.

What I find interesting about the types of behavior described above, which would be considered foolhardy and life-threatening anywhere else in the world, is how they reveal the somewhat astonishing, at least for me, social contract engaged in on the roads. For a pedestrian to be able to step boldly out into the kind of creatively flowing traffic we all experience every day and do so with the confidence that the drivers will go around them (and other drivers will go around the drivers going around the pedestrian in a synchronised dance) shows a high level of trust in one’s fellow citizens. A trust that is rewarded and reinforced (pedestrians live to cross the road another day). However, another way of looking at it is that the pedestrian or the not-looking cart pusher is so arrogant they think all should stop for them. But this, too, is an attitude that could only survive if such pedestrians were able to trust that the fellows they apparently despised would let them live. Which they do. Every day. How remarkable.

Such trust requires the complicity of the motorists, who need to be well prepared and patient, indeed, even gracious, as well as having excellent driving skills, including the ability to make nuanced judgments instantly. It also requires a highly developed feel for the rhythm of the roads, a rhythm created and maintained by mutually understood protocols rather than strictly enforced laws. These protocols, rhythms and skills allow an enormous number of individuals to travel together on increasingly restricted spaces and do so without murder or mayhem.

It is this that makes the traffic of Jakarta or, rather, its motorists, one of the great wonders of the modern world.

Salam