Mobility App and Citizens : Views from Jakarta

Mobility App and Citizens Views from Jakarta

Livelihood, Social, and Governance Implications of Innovation in Informal Transportation in the Developing World

Mobility App and Citizens Ying Gao

December 2017

Acknowledgements This study is an independent academic research conducted mainly in July-August 2017 (MIT COUHES Protocol #1707014280 “Understanding and Measuring Citizen Perceptions of Informal Public Service Provision in the Case of Urban Transport in Indonesia”). The fieldwork was funded by MIT D-Lab International Development Innovation Network (IDIN, https://d-lab.mit.edu/idin) and MIT Governance Lab (MIT GOV/LAB, www.mitgovlab.org).

This document is a research project report submitted to IDIN. I am indebted to colleagues in Indonesia for their wonderful support of this study, particularly in providing insights on critical local contexts and in implementing data collection. I would like to express special thanks to fieldwork research assistants Alisa Delmafitri, Balqisa Farhani, Efod Pangkerego, Irena Lucy Ishimora, Joce Timoty Pardosi, Malindo Marpaung, Meidyca Febriandila, Nur Ratna Mukti, and Wahyu Widi Astuti, as well as colleagues at Kemitraan Habitat, MIT Urban Risk Lab PetaBencana Jakarta project office, RuangWaktu – Knowledge Hub for Sustainable (Urban) Development, University of Indonesia Faculty of Law Student Council, University of Indonesia Geography Department, and United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Jakarta Office. Many others also generously gave help, to which I am thankful.

If there are mistakes or inconsistencies of information in this document, they are mine.

Contact Information Ying Gao, Ph.D. student email: ying_gao@mit.edu | Dept. of Political Science Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

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Table of Contents Acronyms and Terms

4

I. Introduction

5

Changing Informal Sectors: From Innovation to Impact

5

Jakarta: Setting the Scene

6 10

Research Design II. New Apps, Drivers, and Street-Level Governance in Jakarta

14

Pangkalan: Solidarity Groups in Indonesia’s Streets

14

Mechanism: Collective Action within Inequality

19

Governance: Urban Informal Sector as “Co-produced” Public Service

21

III. View Forward

24

Evolving Policy Lessons

24

Next Questions

30

References

34

Appendices – Research Tools

37

Consent Form

37

Interview Tools

38

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Acronyms and Terms

BI

Bank Indonesia, the central bank of Indonesia

BPTJ

Transportation Management Agency of Jabodetabek (Indonesian: Badan Pengelola Transportasi Jabodetabek), a regulatory agency under MoT

BRT

Bus rapid transit; also called “busway” in Indonesian

DKI Jakarta

Special Capital Region of Jakarta (Indonesian: Daerah Khusus Ibukota Jakarta), a provincial-level status local government

IDR

Indonesian Rupiah

Jabodetabek

Greater Jakarta metropolitan region, an administrative definition of the urban area combining the municipalities of Bogor, Depok, Tangerang, South Tangerang and Bekasi, with five municipalities under DKI Jakarta

KRL

Commuter rail (Indonesian: Kreta Rel Listrik); currently in operation

LRT

Light rail transit; currently under construction

MoT

Ministry of Transportation

MRT

Mass rapid transit; currently under construction

Ojek

Motorcycle taxi

Opang

Nickname for ojek drivers’ informal association (Indonesian: ojek pangkalan)

Satpol PP

Public Order Enforcer (Indonesian: Satuan Polisi Pamong Praja), a municipal security and public order authority; it is different from the National Police

TOD

Transit-oriented development

USD

US Dollar

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I.

Introduction

Changing Informal Sectors: From Innovation to Impact Mobility Apps: Innovation Cutting Across Formal and Informal Transport More and more studies are conducted on the rise of so-called sharing economy and mobility network companies, such as Uber and Lyft, in advanced economies in North America and Europe (e.g. Hall and Krueger 2016; Cohen et al. 2016). Similar technologies have made headway into rapidly urbanizing developing countries. But the innovation’s consequences in contexts of rapid urbanization and development are yet to be fully examined. How might policy concerns surrounding the new innovation and labor and tax regulations, as well as relations between new and old workers in transportation jobs, play out in circumstances of high labor informality and urban inequality in cities in the FIGURE 1: APPS O FFER A V ARIETY OF ON global south? This is a critical question that is in an DEMAND M OBILITY, E-P AYMENT AND A DDITIONAL SERVICES IN I NDONESIA . A LL early phase of assessment.

P HOTOS BY Y ING G AO .

In Southeast Asia, motorcycles are popular not just as personal vehicle, but also as public transport for hire. The prevalence of motorcycles as popular transport in this region poses additional complexity (Zhong 2017). They usually operate in a regulatory grey zone. The interplay between this informal industry and the mobility apps means that there are more diverse groups of people affected, and uncertainty and ambiguity related to the changes happening on the ground because of the apps.

Starting from 2015, three mobility network companies have incorporated hundreds of thousands of motorcycle taxis in the region into app-based economy. In a short amount of time, the result has been dramatic. By enrolling them into the new FIGURE 2: APP M OTORCYCLE T AXI, OR platforms, the app innovation has transformed "ONLINE O JEK" citizen behavior on production (drivers) and consumption (users) of an informal public service.

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December 2017 The scale of behavior change has prompted those in the government, urban planning profession, and wider circles of civil society to search for appropriate regulatory response.

But most policy ideas are still only being debated.1 Against this backdrop, this research aims to explore the potential further impacts of the mobility app as an innovation cutting across urban informal and formal economies, focusing on Jakarta, Indonesia.

Jakarta: Setting the Scene A Growing Metropolitan Region with Dynamic Formal and Informal Mixed Economy Greater Jakarta is one of the largest metropolitan regions in the global south. It has a population of 28 million and a dynamic and growing economy, with high levels of urban inequality and informality. Throughout Jakarta’s history, informal economic sectors and informal settlements have played a large part in citizens’ lives. Greater Jakarta’s urban development in the 20th century shows informal sectors growing persistently – or, resiliently – in economic booms as well as FIGURE 3: S ATURATED R OAD TRAFFIC IN slowdowns (Sarosa 1993; Silver 2008).2 C ENTRAL JAKARTA

As for urban transport, contemporary Jakartans famously spend long hours on the road. This is due to limited mass transit services and therefore more road traffic, and poor service quality of public transportation options that are actually on offer. In the past, it has

1 For

indicators of the scale of the apps’ influence, it is sufficient to review publicly available information on three leading service providers: GO-JEK, Grab and Uber. They are respectively Indonesian, Southeast Asia regional, and global companies. All three are “unicorn” startups i.e. privately held, young companies with over USD 1 billion in valuation. Grab has 45 million app 2 The logic of persistent informal sector growth from an urban development perspective is as follows.

Informal sectors grow when the city’s formal economy is in boom because they supply cheap labor, goods and services, feeding into formal sectors. Informal sectors also grow when the formal economy is stagnant. In economic downturn, informal sectors play the role of “employment sponge” to absorb those who have fallen off from the formal job market; the ratio of informal sectors therefore rise relative to the formal counterpart. This has been the situation during the Asian Financial Crisis in late 1990s and most recently in the 2008 global recession. In short, a historical pattern has been that Jakarta’s informal sectors grow in absolute terms during economic booms, and in relative terms in economic stagnation and downturn. From the stagnation of 1950s and 1960s to oil boom years of 1980s, and to more recent years, there has not been decisive evidence that informal sectors and informal settlements would eventually disappear. Why does economic growth fail to shrink urban informality as much as one might expect it to? Authors such as Sarosa and Silver point out the negative effects of encroachment on informal settlements by development projects during good economic times.

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December 2017 been suggested that citizens in the Indonesian capital experience transportation more as a suffering than service – a situation that still cannot be ruled out, though both national and DKI Jakarta provincial governments have made serious investments to improve formal public mass transit through the expansion of TransJakarta BRT system, upgrading of KRL, and construction the new MRT and LRT systems, which are scheduled to open in the next few years. For now, however, traffic jams in Greater Jakarta cost innumerable hours lost for citizens, and around USD 5 billion in economic losses annually, according to an Indonesia Ministry of Public Works and Housing estimate (The Jakarta Post 2015).

The overall urban economy of Jakarta metropolitan region has been upbeat in recent years. Transport and communications industry enjoyed a high growth rate in 2010, along with manufacturing and trade, hotel and restaurant sectors. Ordinary citizens, however, are also hit by the higher cost of living in the city and affected by urban sprawl, wherein informal settlements and suburban agricultural areas in the outskirts are increasingly turned into urban land for development (Mulyana 2012, 5–6) (Figure 3). The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that the share of workers in DKI Jakarta employed in informal jobs has hovered steadily at around 30% in 2005-2010 (Mulyana 2012, 22) (Figure 4).

Being a driver of one kind or another is one of the top job sources in Jakarta across formal and informal sectors. It also follows that Greater Jakarta is one of the largest markets for the motorcycle taxi service now incorporated into digital economy by mobility apps.3 The immense demand for app mobility services, especially the most affordable app motorcycle taxis, has rapidly established this service as a force on the ground, despite a long-standing legal ambiguity. The motorcycle taxi, together with several other popular, smaller transport services, is an informal economic sector by definition and in practice, in light of relevant laws and rules regulating road transport, firm, and labor. Motorcycles acting as public transport for hire have been, and remain at the moment, unlawful under Indonesian law, strictly speaking; they are often also found in violation of various road traffic, safety, and environmental rules.4 In addition, a majority of ojek motorcycle taxi

3 Citizens rely heavily on motorcycles to get around in Southeast Asia. In 2014, motorcycles in DKI

Jakarta outnumbered cars four to one in terms of vehicle registration: 13,084,372 motorcycles were registered, compared to 3,266,009 cars (Badan Pusat Statistik n.d.). However, this data does not distinguish between private motorcycles and motorcycle taxis for hire. As a rough reference point, Bangkok metropolitan region keeps data on motorcycle taxis along with car taxis. Four-wheel and two-wheel taxis together represented 18.9% of transport in Bangkok in 2015 (Suparee 2017).

4 For example, Law No. 22/2009 on Road Traffic states: “Chapter X Transportation: Paragraph 4 Passenger transportation by Public motorized Vehicles not in Trajectories: Article 151 Passenger transportation service by public Motorized Vehicles not in trajectories as referred to in Article 140 letter b shall consist of: a. Passenger transportation by taxi; b. Passenger transportation by certain destination; c. Passenger transportation for tourism purpose; and d. Passenger transportation in certain area.” https://www.scribd.com/doc/100587986/Law-no-22-year-2009-on-Road-Traffic.

Though the specific wording of the Law No. 22/2009 is not without ambiguities, practical rules of

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December 2017 drivers and other small informal transport vehicle drivers is thought to be own account entrepreneurs, an employment status most common in informal economy.

T ABLE 1: P OPULATION T RENDS IN G REATER J AKARTA (1990-2010) Population ('000) Average annual growth 1990 2000 2010 1990-2000 2000-2010 DKI Jakarta 7,106 8,427 9,568 % growth 18.6% 13.5% 1.7% 1.3% Greater Jakarta outside DKI Jakarta 8,860 12,502 18,733 % growth 41.1% 49.8% 3.5% 4.1% Greater Jakarta 15,966 20,929 28,301 % growth 31.1% 35.2% 2.7% 3.1%

F IGURE 4: L ABOR M ARKET AND P OVERTY T RENDS IN J AKARTA (2005-2010) 70% Employment to popula8on ra8o

60% 50%

Informal employment, age 15+

40%

Unemployment rate, age 15+

30% 20%

Youth unemployment rate, age 15-24

10%

Persons in poverty

0% 2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

licensing means that motorcycle passenger transportation service, which is found in every street in Jakarta, actually lacks any clearly defined legal basis for existing.

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Key Questions and Motivations for Studying Mobility Apps’ Impacts in Jakarta This research aims to explore impacts caused by the introduction of mobility apps in on citizens in Jakarta’s informal urban communities, in livelihood, social and governance aspects, in 2015-2017. The apps represent an informational and technological innovation with a global nature. The focus of my inquiry is to describe the local uptake, adaptation, reactions and other behavior in response to this global innovation. 5 “Informal communities” are informal associations and groupings of informal transport drivers, as well as communities of the poor in Jakarta, who typically live in informal settlements or engage in other informal trades.

The issue of Uber-like mobility innovation’s potentially differential influences on various citizens living in different urban sectors and of diverse social backgrounds is an important one. Urban transport, particularly its informal variants like motorcycle taxis and shared minibuses, is a major employment sector for low-skilled workers in developing cities the world over (Khayesi, Nafukho, and Kemuma 2015). Informal transport also provides vital mobility options – often the only way to get around – for poor residents, playing a key role in their access to jobs, resources, and services (Cervero 2000; ESCAP and UN-HABITAT 2015; Taylor 2015). Finally, impacts can be positive or negative, direct or indirect, short or long-term, and are likely to be multifaceted.

In this context, key questions motivating my inquiry into mobility apps and citizens in Greater Jakarta are the following three: 1. Is the innovation influencing citizens’ livelihood, for workers in informal transport sector, and among various subgroups in this sector? And if so, in what ways?

2. Is the innovation influencing citizens’ social behavior, for those working in informal transport sector, as well as other urban informal communities? And if so, how?

3. Is the innovation influencing local capacity for good governance, related to public service provision? If so, what roles do data and information play, and what are the views from relevant institutions, including the government and civil society?

5 My focus in this research is not on the mechanics of the original technology or its business model,

though they are interesting subjects in their own right, particularly when it comes to country-bycountry or even city-by-city local evolution of innovation strategies on the part of these app platforms.

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Research Design Research Approach: Mapping and Interviewing Key Stakeholders In this research, I approach the above three broad questions by: a) Identifying an as comprehensive as possible set of specific stakeholders and stakeholder groups (i.e. stakeholder mapping); and b) Conduct and analyze a series of interviews with members of key stakeholder groups in a variety of locations in Greater Jakarta.

Specifically, the analysis presented in this research draws on interview data from qualitative stakeholder interviews conducted in select locations in Greater Jakarta, in JulyAugust 2017. The semi structured interviews were designed to make sense of recent events as of August 2017 by collecting insights and lived experiences of diverse stakeholder groups, both potential winners and losers, whilst emphasizing the tangible manifestations of urban informality and inequality in a metropolitan region in the global south, Greater Jakarta, together with the critical local conditions and institutions.

The research took advantage of an opportune moment to understand a broader puzzle of urban informality and its economic, social and political roots. The disruptions caused by the mobility apps in Jakarta presented two kinds of opportunity for research: as a window, and as a shock. For researchers and policymakers interested in uncovering the political economy of urban informality, new data from the apps represent a window into the underlying informal industries, and the logic of the groups and communities of citizens in this space. Tracing various citizens’ behaviors in response to the apps can shine a light on the activities in the social and economic life of citizens where little hard data exists. In addition, mobility apps are clearly also a shock to the system. How the apps trigger reverberating responses from different communities of citizens and institutions can be useful information for better policies in the future. In particular, analyzing this “shock” can be instructive on how to (or how not to) manage, govern, collect and interpret data, and predict and improve a mixed formal-informal urban public service system.

Definition of Informality and Informal Transport Finally, I clarify key definitions and concepts of my investigation, particularly on what constitutes informal urban transport sector, informal communities, and their participants, and the scope (i.e. who? what?). To start off, urban informal communities can be spatial or non-spatial. This is to say that communities are social groups that can be place-bound, network-based, or take a variety of other organizational forms. An example of spatial or place-bound urban informal community is slum neighborhood communities, which are generally called kampung (literally, village) in Indonesia. Examples of non-spatial urban informal communities can be work-related associations, including drivers’ groups, religious or ethnic affiliations, which tend to be more network-like, even as they may be anchored to

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December 2017 a specific area. For the purposes of this research, I will extensively discuss informal transport drivers’ membership associations as an occupation-based informal community.

In terms of the definition of informal transport sector, the seminal UN report on informal transport in the developing world gives a flexible definition of “informal”, emphasizing the contexts of operation rather than deterministic physical attributes. The report states, “this sector operates – informally and illicitly, somewhat in the background, and outside the officially sanctioned public transport sector” (Cervero 2000, 3). Several aspects make this definition interesting. First, the degree or pattern of deviation from formal public transport may vary.6 Second, the actual physical forms of informal transport (e.g. vehicle types, route patterns) can also come in many flavors according to this definition. The definition indeed encompasses informal transport modes of all sizes and shapes, equally embracing “paratransit”, which usually refers to vehicles offering fixed or predictable routes (e.g. various “shared taxis”), as well as smaller, door-to-door vehicles (e.g. tuk tuk in Thailand and motorcycle taxis in many regions). Third, the definition describes the informal by relating it to the formal, rather than assuming a black and white distinction between the formal and informal. It suggests a gradation of informality; an informal public transport can be more or less informal, compared to another service.

Extending the definitional guidelines to the plethora of public transport on offer in the streets of Jakarta, below is a list of modes that will be the subject of this report. § § § § § § §

[Becak – pedicab (informal / banned)] Ojek – motorcycle taxis (informal) o App-based o Traditional Bajaj (informal / semiformal) Angkot mikrolet – shared taxis (semiformal / formal) Kopaja bus (semiformal / formal) Taxi (formal) [TransJakarta BRT, KRL commuter rail (formal)]

Without going into extreme details, it should be noted that motorcycle taxis represent a bona fide informal transport; other transport options have varyingly mixed formal / informal characteristics. Those modes in square brackets above are not directly the focus of this research.

6 Cervero

describes: “In some instances, operators lack the necessary permits or registration for market entry in what is a restricted, regulated marketplace. In other instances, operators fail to meet certification requirements for commercial, common-carrier vehicles – such as minimum vehicle size, maximum age, or fitness standards. Other violations include lack of liability insurance, absence of a commercial driving permit, and operation of a unclassified or substandard vehicle (Cervero 2000, 3).”

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Something that we should not forget about is that there are more stakeholders than just the operator and passenger, affecting an informal transport sector. Who makes it possible that a service is illegal, but not so illegal as to be purged from streets? Who (or what) influences the sector to have somewhat predictable price and service standards, or sufficient availability throughout the city? Who are ultimately affected by the app innovation’s impacts, positive and negative, indirectly? In mapping the stakeholders, I opt for casting a wide net for potential categories of stakeholders, as the stakeholder map shows (Figure 5). Though I begin with Cervero’s definitions, the interview findings presented in the later sections may call into question the assumption that informal transport is “unsanctioned” by government authorities, particularly at the street-level.

In Jakarta, the user profile of informal transport encompasses citizens of all walks of life, from the poor to lower middle class and the relatively well-off (e.g. office workers and professionals, university students) (Dielen 2017). Citizen-users’ behavior has been studied relatively well already. For this reason, rather than further investigating middle-class citizen-users’ attitude towards the apps, the bulk of interviews in this report will center on drivers and their informal communities as key stakeholder groups. The next section will focus on these key stakeholder groups, their relationship within groups and among each other, and how they view or are viewed by institutional actors, especially related to urban governance at the street level. These groups are referred to as “entrepreneur driver” together with their competitive peer drivers of rival services in the stakeholder map below (Figure 5).

Innovation Integrates

Citizen / users Invests Middle Class citizens

Low Income citizens

Data

Low cost Unskilled labor Sales

Other urban informal sectors

Rival services: Taxi, bajaj, angkot, KOPAJA…

Investors

Formal Transport providers Capital / Tech

Employee driver Competition

Informal Transport providers Capital / Tech

Regulates Invests Data

Government Politician

Coordinates Bureaucracy Enables

Entrepreneur driver

• Public service access & accountability?

• New data?

Street-level

Civil society

F IGURE 5: P RELIMINARY M AP OF S TAKEHOLDERS I LLUSTRATING P OTENTIAL I MPACTS FROM I NNOVATION IN I NFORMAL T RANSPORT , AND G ROUPS AND I NSTITUTIONS W HO M AY I NFLUENCE OR B E I NFLUENCED BY A NY D EVELOPMENT IN T HAT S ECTOR

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December 2017 It should be noted that this study is exploratory and descriptive in nature, and interview protocols reflect this intention (please see Appendix for details). The findings presented in this document are not meant to conclusively answer questions related to the positive or negative consequences of mobility apps in Greater Jakarta – that situation is continuously evolving at the time of this report’s writing. The hope is, nevertheless, for this short report to contribute to open policy dialogues amongst those who are interested, including stakeholders who may wish to conduct rigorous quantitative data collection in the future, to inform and encourage a greater variety of viewpoints and analytical approaches on this topic, and ultimately to be sensitive to citizens’ needs for diverse livelihoods as well as their own expressions of what it really takes to create better public transport in a highly complex metropolis like Jakarta.

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II.

New Apps, Drivers, and Street-Level Governance in Jakarta

Pangkalan: Solidarity Groups in Indonesia’s Streets

F IGURE 6: A L OGO OF A PP M OTORCYCLE C OMMUNITY S PELLS "B IG F AMILY ," "U NITY "

App and Existing Social Systems in Informal Transport The first point of departure when it comes to app ojek (motorcycle taxi) drivers in Jakarta compared to drivers of car sharing services in developed countries is how highly organized Jakarta drivers seem to be. Though precise percentage could not be obtained, a high proportion of fulltime app ojek drivers belong to a membership-based drivers’ community.

The fulltime drivers perform most number of rides since they are far more frequently on the road, and are the pillar of making the supply of app motorcycle services reliable.

The presence of organized drivers turns on its head the notion that mobility apps create a “gig economy”, which is imagined like a marketplace populated by part-time, individualistic freelancers making deals with individual user / citizens by decentralized transactions. The deals are still decentralized in Jakarta, but providers are socially organized, though informally, at the grassroots level. Soon, it becomes obvious that Jakarta drivers in other types of informal transport are just as organized as the new app motorcycle taxis, if not more. There are many variations of local drivers’ communities, including traditional opang and bajaj drivers’ communities. Even individuals driving hire cars or cargo trucks socialize in groups or associations in the Indonesian context, and so do the taxi

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December 2017 drivers. In streets of Indonesia, these ubiquitous drivers’ communities are called pangkalan (literally, “base camp”).

Expert interviews suggest two reasons for why pangkalan communities exist widely in Indonesian society. The first is to say that pangkalan-like groups have always existed since the dawn of public transportation in Indonesia with the colonial becak (pedicab) drivers. The second is that these communities are the primary tool for workers in informal and low-end formal transport sectors to cope with what is basically difficult conditions of work, and therefore is a template of work-based collective action at the grassroots level.

Membership, Leadership, and Functions of Pangkalan What are the typical membership, leadership selection, and functions of pangkalan communities? Concrete examples in this section mostly draw on app motorcycle pangkalan communities, which are the groups most often interviewed in this research. But the characteristics are shared with pangkalan communities of other transport modes, and insights from pangkalan communities of other modes will be brought in later, too.

A pangkalan is a highly localized work-based community in transportation sectors, with common benefits and useful features for member drivers. The physical “base”, i.e. fixed location for queuing and resting, can be pinpointed to specific (and often tiny) physical spot: e.g. train station X’s gate Y, part of a certain street under a shady tree, a residential neighborhood’s northeast corner, etc. Members of a pangkalan are made up of drivers of the same transport mode. Hence, bajaj, traditional ojek, and app ojek (in fact, each brand) drawing on the same stream of passengers in an area will each form their own base camp.

The origin and basis of socialization of pangkalan is economic and occupational. It is emphatically not the case that there are preexisting social groups, such as family, friends or co-ethnic groups, which then decide to start a pangkalan together.

Diverse, Horizontal Groups In terms of membership, the drivers’ communities are inclusive groups and the standards for joining are to be working in the job, to follow the rules or norms of doing that job in the area, including queuing norms, and, more often than not, to make small weekly contributions to a communal saving.

In my interviews, the size of a pangkalan and pangkalan-like drivers’ ranges from five to around 70; most frequently they were 20-40, and a pangkalan with more than 50 members may be considered large. A large group is only sustained in FIGURE 7: SOME A PP M OTORCYCLE central transport facility, such as a hub train DRIVERS ARE W OMEN

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December 2017 station, or commercial development zones, such as a major shopping mall complex.

Members belong to diverse ethnicity, religion, migration status, etc. For instance, one relatively large app ojek pangkalan includes members who are originally from Java, Sumatra, Papua, and so forth, and who are Muslims as well as Christians. Traditional motorcycle pangkalans have been exclusively male due to that occupation being dominated by men (Cervero 2000). As a new trend, app ojek pangkalan tend to include around 10% women drivers.7 The fact that women drivers are incorporated into app ojek pangkalans very matterof-factly is a testament to the norms of these communities being centered around work socialization and shared livelihood concerns and interests.

Though member drivers’ backgrounds are thus quite diverse, what we can expect to be similar among pangkalan members is their income.

Income is in turn a function of location and size of the pangkalan. In traditional pangkalans of ojek and bajaj, an egalitarian queuing norm all but ensured this within-group income equality. For app drivers, there are no longer queues, and there can be income differences from algorithms prioritizing experienced drivers. Nevertheless, the specific location of base camp will likely still have an equalizing effect on earnings among drivers belonging to the community, as they spend their “idle time” in the base camp, waiting for nearby ride requests.

Social Functions of Pangkalan

FIGURE 8: V ARIOUS E XPRESSIONS OF I DENTITY IN A PP So far, pangkalan communities seem to be an C OMMUNITY important system of labor solidarity in informal M OTORCYCLE P ANGKALAN L OGOS

7 This is a very rough and unevaluated guess, suggested in company interviews as well as in driver

interviews. Observations at pangkalan hangout spots generally seemed to confirm it, though some news reports have quoted the ratio of women app motorcycle drivers to be as high as 20%.

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December 2017 transport, which in turn represents a large employment sector in Jakarta’s services sector economy. But these communities are not purely instrumental associations; rather, they also seem to be important source of social capital at the city’s grassroots. Fulltime drivers work extremely long hours. Typically, this may be 15 hours a day (e.g.

7am to 10pm), with 1-2 hour break, and perhaps 12 rest day(s) per month. And drivers spend most “idle time” at the base camp of the pangkalan they belong to; driver to driver social interaction is hence naturally intensive.

Many driver interviewees are eager to say that they think about their pangkalan as “second family”, “big family”, or “brotherhood” (though also inclusive of women). These words imply meaningful connections. Almost all recent app ojek pangkalan groups invest in unique names, logos, banners, stickers, and so forth out of their own pocket, thereby proudly promoting the group identity to the whole world (Figure 8). Family events are a typical way of spending the communal saving, as well as paying for accidents or injuries of members. Many large groups also have social media presence, which some taxi pool groups also do; taxi pools are considered to be pangkalan of the formal sector variation.

How to Be a Pangkalan Leader A pangkalan always has a leader; the leader is often called “coordinator”, implying a nonhierarchical, horizontal feeling that prevails in these communities. In larger pangkalan groups, the leadership seems to go through a regular and democratic process. Sometimes the leadership may be implicit rather than explicit – a “champion,” a figure of experience, seniority and respect who can use his personal charisma to solve problems and conflicts. According to app motorcycle pangkalan drivers, there are three criteria that make a good FIGURE 9: V ARIOUS G ROUPS OF D RIVERS coordinator. The criteria are: a) seniority, b)

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December 2017 experience, and c) indigenousness (asli).

Seniority, or respect for wisdom of an elder figure, is easy to comprehend. For app motorcycle pangkalan, the second criterion is particularly important because it means that a coordinator should be someone who worked previously as a traditional motorcycle taxi driver, and who knows the ins and outs of that trade. Multiple interviewees both from driver groups and some from private sector suggest that diffused, horizontal interaction between leaders of traditional and new app pangkalans, enabled by more and more traditional drivers participating in app pangkalans, helped reduce extreme competition and atmosphere of conflict that were prevalent in 2016. Another driver interviewee simply says that a coordinator is someone who knows other coordinators, and therefore can have a new pangkalan recognized by others. This suggests that problem solving through coordination vis-à-vis the outside world, by accessing specifically relevant social networks that other members are not plugged into, is the key criterion for these informal leaders.

Indeed, there exists vibrant inter-pangkalan coordination mechanisms, and such mechanisms appear to be highly horizontal and network-like, and they provide effective institution of solving problems. For example, app pangkalan coordinators have set up information infrastructures in the form of closed social network groups, for all coordinators in DKI Jakarta, and Greater Jakarta, to conduct coordination. One interviewee quoted the number of coordinators as 700 for Greater Jakarta for one just one brand.

The third criterion of leader, indigenousness, or a native (Indonesian: asli) person, i.e. born and raised in the surrounding community, is also an interesting one. It is not enough that a coordinator should be from Jakarta and not a recent immigrant. The criterion of “native” is based on a much smaller circle, such as being born and having resided the whole life in the neighborhoods near the base camp location. In fact “native” or asli is a recurrent theme in conversations with drivers, as well as in broader informal communities of Jakarta, such as informal settlements (kampong).

How Pangkalan Affects the Spread of Innovation To recap, to the untrained eye, pangkalan member drivers may look like drivers who happen to be queuing, relaxing, or charging their phones together at the moment. But these informal communities are essential for understanding the speed and scale of the influence of mobility apps in Greater Jakarta. Pangkalan communities enable drivers to learn and adapt to new technology, while reducing social friction through collective action and social mechanisms that they are already familiar with.

Understanding economic and social solidarity of pangkalan helps one to grasp what may be the necessary conditions for the apps to become accepted in a short period of time despite conflicting economic interests on the ground. Mobility apps thrive in Greater Jakarta not despite these grassroots informal communities, but partly because of them. The

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December 2017 app platforms’ ability to attract critical numbers of drivers in turn enables them to provide reliable transportation to citizens throughout Greater Jakarta.

In fact, mobility app companies’ operations in Indonesia pay considerable attention to these informal communities, from initial recruitment of drivers when entering a new city, to ensuring that sufficient number of drivers are actively on the apps to meet demand. Yet the companies deal with them at an arm’s length; the interviews find no evidence of synthetic creation of these groups, but rather, private sector parties tend to either approach existing groups or tacitly observe groups that form naturally. Pangkalan coordinators do not have a special channel of communication with the digital platform provider in their role as pangkalan leader. Therefore, the characteristic of pangkalan is also to be independent, self-organized, and member-oriented.

Mechanism: Collective Action within Inequality Differences among Groups of Drivers The background conditions of why drivers need to associate amongst themselves in the particular organizational format of pangkalan – small, local to the micro level, diffused, and flexible, and therefore not as powerful or efficient as a centralized formal institution – need to be examined critically. Particularly important point is that within-group equality of pangkalan does not mean that informal transport sector as a whole, or driver as an occupation, is a space of equal livelihood.

In this context, what does comparing interview results from driver communities of different modes tell us about the larger picture? How may it help to illustrate additional characteristics of pangkalan and informal transport sector from the point of view of drivers? Comparisons of different pangkalan groups bring home the uniqueness of pangkalan’s ability to channel occupation-based solidarity in the face of high levels of inequality in the sector (transport) by location and by mode (type of transportation). For brevity, I limit comparison to between app and non-app ojek drivers, though it should be noted that many bajaj drivers shared similar opinions as traditional ojek drivers.

A frequent question I encounter in my conversations with the business community, especially with expats who are familiar with how Uber and Lyft work in the United States, is about motorcycle drivers who refuse to join the apps. “What is preventing them from signing up for free, and having more options to earn money? They can even switch different apps on and off, maximizing the bonuses they can win.” Indeed, what may be the reasons?

Part of the answer is structural. The setup of pangkalan as an informal institution already discussed can prevent, or at least add cost to, casual participation in multiple informal transport types. Tech companies also add cost by asking drivers to wear branded jackets and helmets, making it hard to switch on and off, and between, apps and traditional services. In all of our driver interviews, one respondent said he had tried all three main

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December 2017 services, and therefore was in a position to share his experience of attempting to switch the apps to maximize earning. In short, this approach is impractical since the driver has to return home to change into different gears. The cumbersome helmet for customer poses major challenge for nimbly changing the app platforms.

Besides structural barriers, there are individual-level reasons for traditional ojek drivers not to join the bandwagon of app motorcycles. In fact the process of joining the apps is highly self-selective. Driver interviewees who had switched from being a member of opang to app platform were ready to share insights. “There are three reasons,” says a respondent who downloaded the app two years ago (i.e. early adopter) after being an ojek driver for nearly a decade. The first is that they may not have driver’s license. The second is that they may not have paid proper taxes for owning their motorcycles. For example, they may have paid the taxes when they first got the vehicle, but neglected to renew.

Thirdly, some old-timers simply “don't want to learn new tricks.”

An opang (ojek pangkalan) old timer, who has a career of 17 years driving ojek and continues to do it the old way at a major train station, confirms the last point. He is dismissive of the earning potential from the apps. In the heyday of motorcycle taxis (presumably relatively recent), he was able to earn 500 thousand rupiahs / day. Now his income is down to a revenue of around 150 thousand rupiahs / day. But he suspects, correctly, that it is not much different from an app driver’s daily income. Given the decline of sign up bonuses over time, joining the apps implies more effort for the same money.

Hence, there is some logical and behavioral support for ojek drivers who refuse to join the app bandwagon.

Who Benefits? Inequality and Social Ties as Critical Context for Evaluating Impacts The above discussion raises a cautionary point for evaluating the new innovation’s causal effects on a number of outcomes we might care about, such as increased driver earning, social patterns (e.g. level of social activities and networks in pangkalan), or behavioral change (e.g. safer driving, better customer service, different attitudes). Since drivers voluntarily sign up for apps, app drivers tend to be noticeably and predictably different in basic personal attributes, such as age, education, and previous jobs (and gender, as mentioned earlier), than drivers of traditional ojek, bajaj, etc. Any evaluation of driver-level outcomes must take into account, or “control for”, the self-selection and baseline differences that exist among drivers of different modes, and in different micro locations. Crucially, it also requires taking into consideration in analysis urban inequality as critical context, and social ties as a key mitigating mechanism for certain impacts.

Concretely, these points of caution mean that there are various potential or possible effects when it comes to livelihood, even when the general trend seems to be that mobility apps are creating more jobs. The apps may be increasing or reducing inequality in various

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December 2017 direct and indirect ways, or may be qualitatively transforming the kinds of inequality faced by workers in low-skilled job sectors. It may be that drivers are earning more, or less on average; it may also be that with more or less the same take-home income, drivers are finding it valuable to have intangible improvements in livelihood, such as financial information benefits (e.g. earning and credit history in the app), skills, predictability of income, or social status. In addition, to take the example of bajaj drivers, social ties sometimes represent significant hidden mechanisms. Bajaj drivers hail from older and less educated profile, and rarely convert to online ojek driver and therefore are likely suffering largest absolute decline in income; but bajaj driers interviewed also said they had family members who drove app motorcycle for job. The bottom line is that any hypothesis testing of the apps “effects” can benefit from careful identification of comparative groups among the enormously diverse driver communities and informal services sector within Jakarta (or elsewhere), as well as ties between individuals and their families and communities.

Governance: Urban Informal Sector as “Co-produced” Public Service Other Informal Actors and Their Critical Roles As central as they are for the social life of member drivers, pangkalan groups alone do not make informal transport happen, and drivers are not the sole participants in producing informal public service. For vehicles like motorcycle taxi and bajaj to be a public service, i.e. a mobility option widely available for hire throughout the city in pretty much the same format, it takes four key stakeholders at minimum. Interview results based on the wider cast of stakeholders, as shown in Figure 4, provide information on these actors’ roles. These are: 1) 2) 3) 4)

A community of informal labor, i.e. pangkalan-like group; Informal capital and technology; and A broker, who arranges: Street-level government non-intervention, tolerance, or collaboration.

For 2), a driver may own his or her vehicle, such as in the case of motorcycle drivers, or may drive for some owner of the vehicle and pay a rental fee. In the case of app motorcycle taxi, the service is subsidized by the tech startups that provide the app platform. Moreover, when asked about the origin of their pangkalan groups, drivers tend to describe negotiations with institutional actors at the local level, such as officer(s) from the local police station, or real estate developer (who may have an interest in offering a place for drivers as a way of offering to their customers or residents the convenience of transport access).

The arrangements between 4) street-level bureaucracies such as the police and 3) broker is one of the most fascinating aspects. There exists a class of street-level brokers called preman whose role seems highly ambiguous and critical in shaping urban informal

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December 2017 services sector. Elsewhere in academic literature, research interests on preman have focused on their outright political activities, such as acting as tools of intimidation during election campaigns (Wilson 2010), while urban anthropology works have described the preman in extremely multi-dimensional terms, such as “figures of street authority and charisma” and “criminal, entrepreneur, philanthropist, enforcer, local political leader, gambler, sage, mercenary, guerrilla, mediator, broker, entertainer, conciliator, historian, insider, and outsider” (Simone 2014, 13; 232).

However, interviewing drivers and civil society experts in Jakarta suggested these actors’ everyday function in facilitating informal service provision. For example, a bajaj driver pays 9,000 rupiah per day for the local preman’s service, or around 5-10% of his revenue, and the preman in turn “handles” the police, municipal enforcers, etc. A preman can also help the police to “secure the area” when needed, sometimes with the help of informal transport drivers. Drivers are useful for law enforcement officers for being able to serve as eyes on the street (Jacobs 1961), but mobile. What is being traded, then, is a mixture of private, clubbed, and public goods, and the transaction connects the formal and the informal at the street level. To further complicate the picture, the links of transaction or brokerage is not through official bureaucratic hierarchy, but through patronage-like brokering (Scott 1972). These certain, key, non-driver actors tend to be involved from the get-go, shaping the origin of pangkalan and the availability of informal transport service in a given location.

Who Governs? Informal Sector as “Co-produced” Public Good and Public Service Delivery Mechanism Informal transport is famous for being “gap-fillers” (Cervero 2000, 3). It has also been suggested that the sector is “about as close to laissez-faire transportation as can be found,” and “it is only because regulations and rules are laxly enforced that unlicensed operators are ‘informally’ able to step in and pick up where public transport operators have left off” (Cervero 2000, 3). This image of separation between formal and informal transport as the regulated and unregulated transportation may feel like an accurate picture, from a point of view of operating entity (i.e. a bus company, a transit authority, or individual driverentrepreneur) – you are either regulated, or not. It is also clear enough that most informal and semiformal transport services were not in the government’s master plan of urban transportation.

Yet on a closer look, the relationship between government authority and informal transport sector is anything but simple. Whenever BRT or commuter rail do not provide the last leg of the trip, various services show up and are ready to pick up the remainder of the trip. Moreover, there is considerable gradation within informal transport sector, driven by differential enforcement by the government. Informal transport, and the specific patters of how each mode operates in the streets of Jakarta, is not a result of being left alone (i.e. unregulated and unsanctioned); rather, street-level bureaucrats such as police officers

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December 2017 maintain certain ties with leaders of drivers. In addition, government authorities treat similar informal sectors, or subsectors within a broad informal sector (e.g. the various different modes within informal public transport), differently. Reviewing the 20th century development of Jakarta, Sarosa remarks: [T]he government’s treatments of different jobs in the informal sector varied considerably. And by looking at those policies, we may conclude that the government has been ambivalent in its attitude towards informal sector. Harsh treatment without real alternatives indicates that the government actually looks at the problems created by the informal sector above the solutions it offers. Yet in other occasions, some informal sector activities are supported, if not encouraged, as potential job absorbers (Sarosa 1993, 149).

Therefore, the availability of informal services reflects a certain purposeful intention on the part of all stakeholders, including state actors, who are connected with each other in a unique situation of informal governance. The interview responses from this research support viewing the widespread and mostly well-organized informal transport in Jakarta’s streets as a “co-produced” public good, with input from multiple, different stakeholders – and that even the new app mobility services is a continuation of this hybrid nature.

FIGURE 10: A SPATIAL EXAMPLE OF U RBAN I NFORMALITY AS "CO -PRODUCED P UBLIC G OOD "

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December 2017

III.

View Forward

This section shares forward-looking reflections by doing two things. First, it discusses three emerging policy lessons based on recent experiences of the short-term upheavals associated with the introduction of mobility app innovation in Jakarta. This synthesized view is according to the street-level interviews, which I have extensively discussed in the previous chapter, as well as the views held by those in relevant institutions. The latter group of interviews represents the other half of qualitative data collected during my fieldwork (please see Appendix for examples of questions). Second, I wrap up the report by presenting three future directions of research into the longer-term, transformative impacts of mobility apps and how they could ultimately change the lives for citizens and their informal urban communities, particularly through the governance of urban public service delivery.

FIGURE 11: A P ASSENGER IS DROPPED OFF BY APP M OTORCYCLE T AXI AT T RANSJ AKARTA B US STOP IN C ENTRAL J AKARTA

Evolving Policy Lessons The multi-stakeholder perspectives brought together from street-level and institutional interviews offer key insights for policy responses and institutional reforms in the near future, which are suitable for the local context in Jakarta. Specifically, three emerging lessons can be synthesized from the two sets of interviews. These three emerging lessons are:

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December 2017 1) See it like a citizen; 2) Co-create data for co-produced problems; and 3) Look for policy learning in new directions.

Many institutional stakeholder interviewees also shared thoughts on specific policy tools or approaches for incrementally improving informal transport, which are represented below (see Table 2).

T ABLE 2: P OLICIES FOR I MPROVING A CCESS TO T RANSPORT IN F ORMAL -I NFORMAL M IXED S YSTEMS , R ANGING FROM L OW -H ANGING F RUITS TO P OTENTIAL G AME C HANGERS Low-Hanging Fruits §

Mapping of route-based informal transport

§

Incremental safety upgrade (e.g. safe driving training)

Game Changers §

Physical hub integration between formal mass transit and formal as well as informal feeder services

§

Partial fare integration across formal and informal transport of similar mode (e.g. all forms of bus)

§

Encouragement of consolidation among semi-formal transport operators

§

Comprehensive fare integration

§

Comprehensive parking regulation

§

Effective ban or total takeover of informal transport sector by public operators

Lesson 1. See it like a citizen.

Overall, the diverse views shared in interviews for this study invite policymakers and those seeking to devise innovative policy responses to be more sensitive towards the perspectives of communities and groups of citizens at the street-level. How do they see and behave in their everyday life in response to the rapidly changing transport sector? This is a vital input in any policy solutions. Presently, there are disparities between the perspectives held by powerful institutions mandated to make decisions and enforce them, based on rules and existing plans, and people’s daily behavior and concerns in response to rapid changes already occurring. Specifically, it is important to understand how Jakarta’s citizens are reorganizing their livelihood and social activities around the new services, and integrating the opportunities offered by the technology while using grassroots social capital to keep frictions under control. In other words, user-citizens already depend on the new service,

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December 2017 while the disruptions in livelihood have affected relatively smaller groups of traditional drivers in Jakarta. 8 Balancing the competing interests of producers, consumers, and citywide and long-term public interests is the challenge. There is no simple fix, but it is clear that the puzzle of public service delivery must be centered on all citizens and not just those involved in the production of service.

A case in point of the need for citizen-centric (or behavior-centric) approach to urban transport is the de-facto integration in the face of lack of formal integration in Jakarta’s urban transport system. In Jakarta, where there is a nearly total absence of formal integration of different urban transportation modes in terms of fare, physical infrastructure, or schedule, citizens are “voting with their feet” everyday by using a host of informal public transport options as stopgap measure and imperfect feeder lines. This behavior makes it possible for them to use the public mass transit where it is available. Therefore, analysts should not automatically interpret the popularity of app informal transport as “exit” (Hirschman 1969) from the government’s official public goods provision system, i.e. formal public mass transit, especially without good evidence. Rather than ditching the mass transit, a preliminary survey research by ITDP finds that a plurality of citizens uses formal and informal public transport as complementary goods; they connect formal and informal transport options in a single trip (Dielen 2017). Albeit preliminary, this data contradicts government and aid agency representatives, who fret that on-demand app services may be out-competing TransJakarta or KRL, and therefore amount to dooming the ongoing mass transit investments. In the future, larger and more rigorous citizen-centric data collection can unravel additional behavioral foundations and citizen preferences, which should serve as a basis for data-driven policy actions towards the difficult task of improving the realities of transport integration in Jakarta.

But there is no consensus view on the part of powerful institutions regarding how or if this sector, i.e. informal transport, which has long been under-regulated, should be regulated now that it has made a surprisingly dramatic entry into the digital age. Hence, a civil society interviewee worries that the government is making technical and regulatory decisions on transport management without being informed by what he calls “full reality.”

Full reality in this sense means full experiences of citizens from all walks of life and their holistic concerns in their daily lives. The civil society activist points out that different cities in Indonesia are responding to the same app motorcycle phenomenon with widely different policies, ranging from strict prohibition to tolerance with a “wait and see” attitude. He is under the impression that these differences in policy response have more to do with the strength of existing local ojek organizations in a given city, rather than the result of careful evaluation of merits and costs, and long-term vision on how to improve transport as a vital public service for all citizens.

8 Whether this is true as a general pattern everywhere, or is dependent on city-specific conditions, is

another question that needs empirical test.

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December 2017 “Seeing it like a citizen” does not mean that government agencies should somehow accommodate, pander to, or even give up on reining in the kinds of citizen behavior that are illegal or problematic to the public. What it suggests is to engage more seriously with the de facto integration of formal-informal public transport services that largely exists, and has existed long before the current innovation-led disruptions. And this de facto integration should be considered seriously for its merits because citizens already rely on it, and because it potentially helps the transition to greater mass transit usage rather than obstruct it, as hinted in the ITDP research.

Lesson 2. Co-create data for co-produced problems.

The policy lesson to “see it like a citizen” leads to the need to boost relevant institutions’ and stakeholder groups’ capacity to make, implement and evaluate citizen-centric transport policies. This in turn must be achieved by balancing various data that may or may not exist already, including model-based information readily available in traditional transport planning, other data sources, and creative new data on the actual, often complex behavior patterns of citizens. Even if a political will to do something about the apps and informal transport existed, however, at the present moment, patchy official data and increasing amounts of private, unshared big data held FIGURE 12: A PP OJEK , T AXI AND A NGKOT by the app companies may be making it difficult for C ARRY R USH H OUR C OMMUTERS IN SOUTH JAKARTA governments to respond to the new facts on the ground.

As discussed, seeing it like a citizen and making policies attuned to such a perspective necessitate collaboration between public and private sectors, and across multiple stakeholder groups. But information barriers make effective cooperation unlikely to emerge spontaneously. What are some of the “institutional” obstacles to innovative cooperation, which a new collaborative initiative will have to overcome? For one thing, responsibility is unclear in this area. Informal transport is a grey area, which can be seen as no one’s problem, or everyone’s problem – perhaps this is why it has been left to streetlevel actors to sort out for such a long time. Furthermore, the issues of digitized informal transport cut across a wide collection of governmental domains, not only transportation per se. Institutions are powerful in having large resources at their disposal, yet they are constrained by their mandates and organizational interests. For various parts of the government, their ability in dealing effectively with fast-changing transport sector is limited by legal and administrative standards that they are held accountable to. Asked about why integration and coordination within the government itself is so hard, an expert interviewee

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December 2017 emphasizes that public entities are bound by specific legal mandates, and, increasingly, committed to different key performance indicators (KPIs). For example, TransJakarta’s key metrics include bus frequency and user satisfaction. On the other hand, as described in this report’s empirical section, enforcement agencies such as the National Police and Satpol PP extensively shape street-level behavior, but respond to different rules and guidelines than those of transportation management. Some new government units, such as the Fintech Office housed within Bank Indonesia (BI), are committed to promoting innovation itself, in addition to financial inclusion and poverty reduction, and thus the digital financial transactions carried out in the app platforms are of regulatory interest to them.

Private sector companies face no such rigid limitation in terms of what they can get their hands into. This leaves the field wide open for startup companies such as GO-JEK, Grab and Uber. In Indonesia and elsewhere, they have morphed into enormous multiservice platforms, integrating on a massive scale what used to be a highly segmented service landscape. Yet, what constrains the behavior of private companies, and a very powerful constraint at that, is commercial competition. Hence, as company interviewees admit, fierce competitive pressures to recruit and retain drivers and users, maintain a critical mass, and build internal capacity for even more expansion, so as to “out-innovate” the others, leave companies reluctant to share their in-house data. This creates missed opportunity for multi-stakeholder collaboration to address the negative aspects of the rapid expansion of mobility apps, because open data, when appropriately shared, can be a common pool resource to help everyone make better decisions. Whether government agency or tech startup, powerful institution thus faces limitations, and cannot solve or optimize alone.

Collaborative data collection and management can help stakeholders to build the first steps towards collaborative solutions. It helps the partnering organizations to overcome key information barriers, especially if it starts with an understanding that informal transport is in fact a co-produced phenomenon with some benefits as well as negative side effects. As shown earlier, informal transport is a service produced with resources from both public and social forces, and enabled by years of tacit management by street-level government agents. In order to improve or find solutions to its co-produced problems, i.e. the side effects of informal transport, then, stakeholders need to first cocreate good data to understand it. Collaborative data collection also has the advantage of being more suitable for decentralized data collection. In addition, multi-stakeholder perspectives can serve as a reality check on interpreting sensitive data. A cautionary tale to keep in mind may be the experience from 2005 traffic data. When improvement was made in the time-series data on traffic accidents, the number of accidents seemed to suddenly rise in 2005; this was not due to more accidents but a consequence of more effective reporting by the police (Nahry, Soehodho, and Tjahjono 2012, 47). A rigorous evaluation of complex impacts like the evolving impacts from mobility apps is highly sensitive to research design and sampling strategy. It stands to benefit from multi-stakeholder inputs.

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Lesson 3. Look for policy learning in new directions.

So far, it is clear that citizens already depend on the de facto integration of formal and informal transport—for employment, and for the basic needs to get around affordably in a highly unequal city. It is also clear that there are great potential benefits from multistakeholder and inter-agency collaboration. The previous lesson argued that this collaboration should start from collaborative data collection. Such a situation is not unique to Jakarta or Indonesia. So, where might Jakarta’s stakeholders look to find inspiration, plans, or models of mixed formal-informal urban transportation systems, which are being improved to work for all citizens? As cliché as it sounds, where should Jakarta look for in terms of “best practices” based on other countries’ or cities’ experiences?

To learn from viable, and, even better, well-tested solutions for urban transport challenges of the kinds found in Jakarta, with their key political economy dimensions and complex social relations at the street-level, Jakarta and other local governments in middleincome countries can learn more from each other’s rich experiences. Cities in Southeast Asia traditionally tend to “look east” for policy learning, seeing Seoul, Singapore, Tokyo and the like as best examples of infrastructure development, urban management, as well as metropolitan governance. There is no doubt that they are key development partners for Southeast Asia governments. Nevertheless, in terms of the contexts on the ground, these cities are a world apart from present-day Jakarta. East Asian “developmental states” have dealt with large informal sectors much earlier, and for much shorter period of time historically, due to the rapid industrialization of their national economies in late 20th century (Freeman 2009). These countries arguably did not have to contend with entrenched urban informal sectors, high inequality, and pervasive informal service sectors in their urban economies. With different fiscal capacities, they have also invested earlier and massively in public transit. Such differences in contexts imply that they may not be particularly experienced in the confluence of rapid urban growth, persistent informal economic sectors, and premature deindustrialization (Rodrik 2016), which are the empirical contexts common in today’s global south. Therefore, in addition to looking east, Jakarta can pay attention to other parts of the world for practical policy exchange.

For instance, a recent study commissioned by the Volvo Research & Educational Foundation (VREF) makes a convincing case for investing in informal transit even when the government’s overall plan is to expand and improve formal mass transit system, based on experiences of African cities (Jennings and Behrens 2017). The lessons from Cape Town and Johannesburg suggest that “strategies devised by national or local authorities have a greater chance of success if they are aimed at improving the profits and income security of paratransit operators” (Jennings and Behrens 2017, 20). The introduction of TransJakarta based on the Bogotá model was another early example of just how effective such southsouth cooperation could be. In short, lessons from other developing regions can give valuable insights and benchmark data for Southeast Asian cities, which have similarly

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December 2017 diverse and important informal services sector, which cannot be ignored in citizen-centric policy debates and urban planning.

Next Questions Views from various stakeholders in Jakarta hint at many critical questions for further empirical examination. For this section, I focus on three urban governance and development implications that are of wider concern, i.e. beyond the immediate service providers and users. The three policy research agendas for future should address the questions: 1) What causes variations in the governance of formal-informal mixed urban basic services provision system, and what are the accountability implications?

2) What should we predict about collective action in informal economy in the digital age?

3) How should we approach the “Is formalization the answer?� question surrounding informal workers and sectors today?

Each future research question will be discussed briefly below.

Research Agenda #1: Causes of Variation in Formal-Informal Mixed Public Service Governance

My preliminary study shows that there are predictable patterns of urban transportation combining both formal transit officially provided by the state and informal transport tacitly supported by the state, with foundations in historical precedents and grassroots groups of citizens. Albeit opaque, these relations between the government and the governed are consequential for the quality and levels of urban basic services delivery. Indeed, the formal state, as embodied by powerful institutions as well as street-level bureaucrats, like police officers, informal political brokers, such as the preman, and street-level social groups, such as the pangkalan, jointly shape urban transport in Jakarta. Formal-informal mixed transport is a pillar of service delivery in reality, and contributes to what makes a modern city run.

But what causes differences in outcome? This is a critical, and logical follow-up question. Such service delivery systems can be easily found in other cities and sectors (e.g. clean water, waste management), but also can be expected to be very different from place to place, and time to time. Moreover, the outcome of interest should not be limited to the direct outcomes of good or bad service, but also its indirect implications for accountability surrounding such a complex and opaque mechanism for producing the urban services citizens need. More broadly, in this report, I tried to convey preliminary evidence that greater change can happen through not only economic and technological direct impacts, but also through social patterns, collective action and political actions. Accountability is part of long-term, sustainable service delivery. The basic concept of accountability in government

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December 2017 services delivery involves four actors, who play essential roles. These are: 1) citizen-clients i.e. users, 2) the state, including politicians and bureaucrats, and providers, consisting of 3) organizational providers, and 4) frontline providers (World Bank 2004, 47–50). The citizens are users of the public services in question, and have the right to vote and to voice opinions vis-à-vis government policies. The state actors are legally obliged to respond to citizens’ demands by appropriately delegating public service provision tasks to the providers. As for the providers, who are assumed to be either an organization or its frontline employees (e.g. public health clinics and frontline medical professionals, post office and postal workers, etc.), they also face obligations to meet the requirements from the government, often specified in contracts, and deliver services to the citizens.

Are informal drivers and transport operators analogous to frontline public service providers in this formal accountability framework? But who is responsible for their service quality, and through which channel can citizens voice their opinions and create change in this system? To what extent do higher institutions have control over street-level service delivery and governance, managed through social arrangements rather than formal government contract? And, is app-based information exchange replacing citizen groups’ need for traditional “brokers” between the government and citizens?

In the past, there has been research on direct political bargaining behavior by drivers or operators with politicians (Goodfellow and Titeca 2012; Goodfellow 2015; Khayesi, Nafukho, and Kemuma 2015; Sopranzetti 2013), and in-depth profiling of the highly ambivalent role played by intermediary brokers such as the preman (Simone 2014).

Time is ripe for more systematic analysis of the grey space of public service delivery in reality, and how street-level informal institutions link with technological innovation, informal governance, and wellbeing and participation of the wider citizenry in a rapidly urbanizing metropolis.

Research Agenda #2: The Future of Informal Sector Collective Action in the Digital Age Do street-level informal institutions of economic solidarity scale up, and how does the app phenomenon affect informal workers’ ability to organize as a labor group rather than as informal social group? Given the high visibility and the quick rise and fall of violent protests in Jakarta in response to the apps, this is an interesting question – one that could end up showing a divergent paths between developed and developing economies. Recent analysts of the app phenomenon in Indonesia have suggested that the apps may have inadvertently ushered in a centralized collective bargaining opportunity not seen before.

A less obvious (and unintended) effect of the rapid growth of app-based transport companies has been the emergence of greater opportunities for collective action.

These companies refer to their drivers as ‘partners’ rather than ‘employees’. But they nevertheless provide a focal point for drivers seeking to act collectively to demand

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December 2017 better working conditions, which is not available to conventional motorcycle taxi drivers (Ford and Honan 2017, 277).

On the other hand, other experts argue that the centralized information platform results in dependent contractor relations, wherein drivers are subjected to the price and working conditions determined by the apps, and therefore their work relations may be better characterized as exploitative employment (Nastiti 2017).

Previous empirical studies of motorcycle taxi drivers in Bangkok (Sopranzetti 2013; Goodfellow 2015), owner-operators of matatu shared taxi in Nairobi (Khayesi, Nafukho, and Kemuma 2015), and bus operators’ associations in Latin America (Gwilliam 1993) have generally found transport workers and operators to be among the most capable and wellorganized when it comes to interest representation in urban areas. This is unlikely to change, but there may be consequences on other informal sectors wherein poor citizens are more likely to be employed, since transport tends to be an important intermediate input in many products. It is also useful to carefully compare the pangkalan with the formal institution of labor solidarity, i.e. labor union, and understand what the pangkalan offers or lacks, and whether the app phenomenon is leading to more large-scale but reactionary and “informalized” collective bargaining processes. In my interviews, traditional union leaders were hopeful of reaching out to app drivers since they regarded that all drivers faced similar working conditions and take-home pay. Yet appetite on the part of ojek drivers for joining formal unions seemed thin. Regardless, in the big picture, one of the most important research areas in terms of the consequences of the apps will be on long-term transformation of labor markets and labor relations in the informal and low-end urban services sector in developing countries.

Research Agenda #3: Unpacking the “Is Formalization the Answer?” Question, and Answering It The perennial question ever since informal economy was “discovered” in the 1970s has been “Is formalization the answer?” (Chen, Bonner, and Carré 2015). While we should not imagine that mobility apps are transforming everything about the diverse world of informal economic activities, how the apps work does make clear an important consideration that is generally true about any formalization process, which is that formalization is a policy package with multiple, potentially contradictory dimensions. Namely, formalization involves at least four distinct processes – legalization, financialization9, social protection, and professionalization. The International Labor Organisation (ILO) guidelines on formalization declare that livelihoods should not be destroyed in the process of

9 This aspect is usually referred to as “financial inclusion”, and signifies joining the formal financial

markets. The term “financial inclusion” suggests only the benefits of integration into formal markets, while there are also tradeoffs and risks individuals and households may face through integration into financial markets. Therefore, I have opted to call it financialization.

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December 2017 formalization of informal employment (International Labour Office 2007). However, the four dimensions of formalization may work against each other, or may have different effects depending on the sequencing and other policy-specific contexts. In addition, there is an inherent level of precariousness in informal work, wherein jobs are created and destroyed not only by regulation and enforcement (or the lack thereof), but also by exogenous shocks, such as the app technology, and more commonly, real estate appreciation. It should be noted that the app platforms hold within them data on all four dimensions: legal (i.e. registration), financial (i.e. transaction and e-wallet), social protection (i.e. health insurance), and professional (i.e. ratings and driving patterns). New data into professionalization and skills development is particularly interesting for the formalization debate.

At this moment, as the app companies are poised to expand further into informal economic sectors, such as food and other personal services sector in Indonesia, whether the apps are creating another path to upgrading and formalization of informal workers and entrepreneurs should be studied with evidence. Is the digital job offering the perks of formal work without the usual costs of formalization, such as paying taxes and for healthcare? Is the effective incentive structure of the apps a proof, as some expert interviewees suggested, that there needed to be an extra incentive in previous formalization policies, because legalization alone was not sufficient to convince informal workers to take the risks of formalization? If so, might that extra incentive be social and community-based, rather than economic? Or, alternatively, is it a matter of scale and speed offered by the citywide app, which prevents leakage common in place-specific formalization interventions, such as formalization of traditional markets? These are all future questions that should energize and contribute to the debate around formalization of the informal economy.

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December 2017

References Badan Pusat Statistik. n.d. “Transportation Statistics of DKI Jakarta 2015.” Katalog BPS: 8301009.31. http://jakarta.bps.go.id/backend/pdf_publikasi/StatistikTransportasi-DKI-Jakarta-2015.pdf.

Accessed October 6, 2017. http://jakarta.bps.go.id/backend/pdf_publikasi/Statistik-Transportasi-DKI-Jakarta2015.pdf.

Cervero, Robert. 2000. Informal Transport in the Developing World. Nairobi, Kenya: United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat). http://unhabitat.org/books/informal-transport-in-the-developing-world/.

Chen, Martha, Chris Bonner, and Françoise Carré. 2015. “Organizing Informal Workers: Benefits, Challenges and Successes.” Background Paper. New York, NY: UNDP. http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/chen_hdr_2015_final.pdf.

Cohen, Peter, Robert Hahn, Jonathan Hall, Steven Levitt, and Robert Metcalfe. 2016. “Using Big Data to Estimate Consumer Surplus: The Case of Uber.” No. 22627. NBER Working Paper. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. http://www.nber.org/papers/w22627.pdf.

Dielen, Charline. 2017. “Unravelling Online Ojek’s User Profile in Jabodetabek: A Multi-Level Identification Method.” Bachalor’s thesis in international traffic management, Jakarta, Indonesia: NHTV Breda University of Applied Sciences; the Institute for Transportation & Development Policy (ITDP) Indonesia.

ESCAP, and UN-HABITAT. 2015. “The State of Asian and Pacific Cities 2015.” United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat). http://unhabitat.org/books/thestate-of-asian-and-pacific-cities-2015/.

Ford, Michele, and Vivian Honan. 2017. “The Go-Jek Effect.” In Digital Indonesia: Connectivity and Divergence, edited by Edwin Jurriëns and Ross Tapsell, 275–88. Indonesia Update Series. Singapore: ISEAS - Yusof Ishak Institute.

Freeman, Richard. 2009. “Labor Regulations, Unions, and Social Protection in Developing Countries: Market Distortions or Efficient Institutions?” Working Paper 14789.

Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w14789.

Goodfellow, Tom. 2015. “Taming the ‘Rogue’ Sector: Studying State Effectiveness in Africa through Informal Transport Politics.” Comparative Politics 47 (2): 127–47. https://doi.org/10.5129/001041515814224462.

Goodfellow, Tom, and Kristof Titeca. 2012. “Presidential Intervention and the Changing ‘politics of Survival’ in Kampala’s Informal Economy.” Cities 29 (4): 264–70. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2012.02.004.

Gwilliam, Ken M. 1993. “Urban Bus Operators’ Associations.” Infrastructure Notes 3.

Transport.

Washington, D.C: World Bank. http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTTRANSPORT/Resources/3362911119275973157/td-ut3.pdf.

Hall, Jonathan, and Alan Krueger. 2016. “An Analysis of the Labor Market for Uber’s DriverPartners in the United States.” NBER Working Paper 22843. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w22843.

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December 2017 Hirschman, Albert O. 1969. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

International Labour Office. 2007. The Informal Economy: Enabling Transition to Formalization.

Geneva, Switzerland: ILO. http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/@ed_emp/@emp_policy/documents/ meetingdocument/wcms_125489.pdf.

Jacobs, Jane. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Vintage Books edition. New York, NY: Vintage Books.

Jennings, Gail, and Roger Behrens. 2017. “The Case for Investing in Paratransit: Strategies for Regulation and Reform.” Gothenburg, Sweden: Volvo Research & Education Foundations (VREF). http://www.vref.se/download/18.4e2c682015cbc9804d6e5b49/1499247366131/ Investing+in+Paratransit+-+Jennings_Behrens+-+June+2017.pdf.

Khayesi, Meleckidzedeck, Fredrick Muyia Nafukho, and Joyce Kemuma. 2015. Informal Public Transport in Practice: Matatu Entrepreneurship. Transport and Society.

Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

Mulyana, Wahyu. 2012. Decent Work in Jakarta: An Integrated Approach. Bangkok, Thailand: ILO Regional Office for Asia & the Pacific. http://www.ilo.org/public/libdoc/ilo/2012/468521.pdf.

Nahry, Sutanto Soehodho, and Tri Tjahjono. 2012. “Changes in Traffic Safety Policies and Regulations in Indonesia (1950-2010).” Changes in Traffic Safety Policies and Regulations in 7 Countries (1950-2010). International Association of Traffic and Safety Sciences. www.iatss.or.jp/common/pdf/en/iatss/.../7CountriesReport_en_02Indonesia.pdf.

Nastiti, Aulia Dwi. 2017. “Worker Unrest and Contentious Labor Practice of Ride-Hailing Services in Indonesia.” In 2016 Arryman Fellows Papers, 39. Jakarta, Indonesia. http://www.isrsf.org/2016-arryman-fellows-papers.

Rodrik, Dani. 2016. “Premature Deindustrialization.” Journal of Economic Growth 21 (1): 1– 33. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10887-015-9122-3.

Sarosa, Wicaksono. 1993. “The Dual ‘Formal-Informal’ Growth of Jakarta: A Study of the Morphological Impacts of Economic Growth in a Metropolis of the Developing World.” M.A. Thesis in City Planning, Berkeley, CA: University of California at Berkeley.

Scott, James C. 1972. “Patron-Client Politics and Political Change in Southeast Asia.”

American Political Science Review 66 (1): 91–113.

Silver, Christopher. 2008. Planning the Megacity: Jakarta in the Twentieth Century. London; New York: Routledge.

Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2014. Jakarta, Drawing the City Near. Minneapolis, MN ; London, UK: University of Minnesota Press.

Sopranzetti, Claudio. 2013. “The Owners of the Map: Motorcycle Taxi Drivers, Mobility, and Politics in Bangkok.” Doctoral dissertation, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:11169780.

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December 2017 Suparee, Thosapol. 2017. “Sustainable Urban Transport in Bangkok - Traffic and Transportation Department, Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA).” presented at the UNESCAP Regional Meeting on Sustainable Urban Transport Index (SUTI), Jakarta, Indonesia, March 2. http://www.unescap.org/sites/default/files/Country%20Report_Thailand1_SUTI.pdf.

Taylor, John. 2015. “The Angkots of Solo: Report on Batik Solo Transit and Angkot Integration.” Surakarta; Denpasar: Yayasan Kota Kita and Urban Launchpad. http://www.kotakita.org/publicationsdocs/The%20Angkots%20of%20Solo_150528.pdf.

The Jakarta Post. 2015. “Greater Jakarta: Jakarta Traffic Jams Cause Rp 65 Trillion in Losses.”

The Jakarta Post, May 23, 2015. http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2015/05/23/greater-jakarta-jakarta-trafficjams-cause-rp-65-trillion-losses.html.

Wilson, Ian Douglas. 2010. “The Rise and Fall of Political Gangsters in Indonesian Democracy.” In Problems of Democratisation in Indonesia: Elections, Institutions, and Society, edited by Edward Aspinall and Marcus Mietzner, 199–218. Indonesia Update Series. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.

World Bank. 2004. World Development Report 2004: Making Services Work for Poor People.

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Zhong, Raymond. 2017. “Southeast Asia’s Ride-Hailing War Is Being Waged on Motorbikes.”

The New York Times, December 8, 2017, sec.

Technology. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/08/technology/southeast-asia-ridehailing.html?smid=tw-share.

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December 2017

Appendices – Research Tools Consent Form You have been asked to participate in a research study conducted by Ying Gao, from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Political Science department. The purpose of the study is to understand the issues of public transportation and innovation, their relations to aspects such as governance and impacts on different groups of people and communities, in Jakarta.

You should read or listen to information below, and ask questions about anything you do not understand, before deciding to participate or not in this study.

•

Voluntary participation: Your participation in interview or focus group for this study is completely voluntary. You can choose to answer or not as many questions as you wish. You are free to stop or leave the interview or focus group, or withdraw your participation at any time, even after the participation.

•

Confidentiality: Your opinions and answers to questions will be kept anonymous. During this interview or focus group, written notes will be taken. These notes will be anonymous – who said what will never be attributed individually, in notes, conversations with other people, or in research reports or presentations. Your names and contact information will never be shared with other people, except if required by law or if you give separate, written permission for sharing. Research data such as interview notes will be kept in secure computers and will be protected with password.

•

Risks and benefits: The study is an independent academic research, supported by USAID through IDIN (d-lab.mit.edu/idin), and MIT GOV/Lab (www.mitgovlab.org/). Since it is an academic research project, the outcomes of the study is not linked to any economic benefits or development projects or actions. There will not be monetary compensation for your participation in this study. Generalized findings from this study may be summarized in an outcome report. In addition, findings from this study may be reported in scholarly journals, at academic seminars and research association meetings, and on sponsor institution outlets (e.g.

IDIN website, MIT GOV/Lab blog, USAID office). If you wish to obtain these public outcome reports or presentations, just let me know. The project is expected to be completed by 31 August 2017.

•

Further questions or concerns: For any questions or concerns about this research, you can reach me at [ ].

•

If you feel you have been treated unfairly during your participation in this study, or you have questions regarding your rights as a research subject, you may contact the Chairman of the Committee on the Use of Humans as Experimental Subjects, MIT, Room E25-143b, 77 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA; phone +1 (617) 253-6787.

Based on above information, please indicate whether you are willing to participate in this research.

I agree to participate in this research:

YES

/

NO

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December 2017

Interview Tools Driver or Operator Questionnaire Basic Information Ask or note these personal details to the extent possible, during the course of natural conversation.

1. Age / are you married?

2. Gender 3. Migration / residency situation a. Are you originally from this city? b. Do you live near this area? Which community or area?

4. Work situation a. Is driving (or operating transport) your main occupation? How long have you been doing this work? How many hours per day do you work on this job? b. What was your job before?

5. Education attainment Transport Services / Work / Operations 6. Do you own the vehicle? a. Did you buy a new vehicle for this, and did you get a loan (and if so, how long does it take to pay back)? b. What is the vehicle age?

7. Do you participate in a drivers’ association? Why do you participate? a. Describe the origin, the role and membership rules of the association. What’s the size of membership, and location of “base”? b. Is there a “higher organization”, such as alliance of associations? c.

How is the relationship between your drivers’ association, with other drivers’ associations (in the area) / company (app) / government, etc.?

8. What are the typical length and destination you drive (popular destinations of customers)? How much money do you make on an average trip? How many trips do you make on an average day? a. If you are an app driver, how much of your trips are for transporting goods vs. passengers vs. other services? b. Do you always wait for customers out of here:__________? Do you operate out of or make trips to Transjakarta, train, or bus stops? Or, do you cruise around to get customers?

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December 2017 c.

What is a typical customer like? Do you get diverse customers?

9. Impact of apps: a. If you drive for app, do you make more money, or find more passengers because of the app? What is the best part, and worst part, about driving for app? b. If you don’t drive for app, has it impacted your work or earning? Does it compete with you? c.

Has the popularity of the apps affected you in other ways? (E.g. e-wallet and cashless payment, etc.)

Opinions on Transport 10. Besides your personal interest as a driver, what’s your opinion on the apps?

11. In your opinion, what is the main problem of transport in this? What’s the main cause of that problem? a. In your opinion, do the government’s transport policies benefit everybody in this city?

12. Does government have good policy for transport services? a. In your business (your specific transport type), is there a problem that you wish the government would solve?

Knowledge of Transport Governance – Extra These are extra questions if you find yourself with talkative driver. Alternatively, you could ask questions about the history community, or any detail about conflict with other drivers.

13. Does the city government regulate your transport service? How? 14. Does the national government regulate your transport service? How? 15. To make transport work better in this city, drivers / operators should: a. Improve service quality, such as safety and schedule b. Vote in elections c.

Submit opinions to city or national government

d. Follow traffic laws e. Organize a protest in the streets f.

Complain on social media

g. Other: please explain 16. Is there anything else that you would like to say about any of the issues we discussed?

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December 2017

Citizen Questionnaire Basic Information Obtain information to the extent possible: 17. Age 18. Gender 19. Education attainment 20. Migration / residency situation a. Are you originally from this city? b. Have you always lived in this area, or know many people in the community?

21. Work situation Transport Usage 22. How often do you use the following transportation modes, every week? (E.g. every weekday, a few times a week, once a week, only weekend, etc.) a. Transjakarta bus rapid transit (BRT) • From where to where do you ride it most often? b. Commuter rail • c.

From where to where do you ride it mostly?

Buses: Angkot, KOPAJA, Metromini, Bus Besar, other

d. Motorbike taxi (ojek / app ojek) •

From where to where do you ride it mostly?

e. Bajaj f.

Taxi

g. My own vehicle (if you have one): Car, Motorbike h. Other (e.g. boat, bicycle, I just walk, etc.)

23. What are your purposes for using the different transport modes you mentioned? Please tell us which transport you use for the following purposes, if it applies. a. Commuting to workplace or school b. Entrepreneurship activities (e.g. to sell or move goods, to reach customers, etc.) c.

Access to public facilities and services, or community activities, such as: •

Hospitals, Government offices, Places of worship (e.g. mosques, churches, temples), Community centers (other than religious institutions), Parks or other public facilities

d. Access to commercial activities (e.g. grocery shopping):

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December 2017 •

Market

•

Shopping mall (in city center?)

•

Other

e. Leisure activities (e.g. visit friends or family, etc.)

24. Which transport mode would you use if you were: a. In a hurry? b. Having to carry large baggage? c.

Going alone vs. as group (e.g. with friends or family)?

d. Going for short distance vs. long distance (more than 1 hour travel time)? e. Have to go somewhere late at night, etc.?

25. Do you use any of the transport apps (e.g. Grab, GOJEK, Uber, etc.), especially app ojek?: a. As passenger? If yes, how often, and for which transport? Do you use the transport more often because of the app, and if yes, why (e.g. cost, safety, availability, etc.)? b. As driver or car owner? If yes, is being a driver your (main) job? Do you make more money, or find more passengers because of the app?

26. Who did the apps benefit or affect, in your opinion?

Opinions on Transport 27. Are you satisfied with transport in this city, or in this area? Why or why not?

28. In your opinion, what is the main problem (e.g. traffic jam, traffic accidents, environment, bad service, etc.)? What’s the main cause of that problem?

29. In your opinion, do the government’s transport policies benefit everybody in this city?

Knowledge of Transport Governance 30. Do you know about the LRT or MRT (or other transport plan) affecting where you live?

What do you expect to happen?

31. Is there anything else that you would like to say about any of the issues we discussed?

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December 2017

Policymaker or Expert Questionnaire Transport Usage Ask them to answer these without thinking too much!

32. Roughly how much, in terms of %, do this city’s citizens depend on the following transportation modes? (This can be very rough, just your personal impression – everyone can have different impressions, though please also let me know if you know there is hard data somewhere.) a. Transjakarta bus rapid transit (BRT) b. Commuter rail (KRL) c.

Buses (KOPAJA, Metromini, Angkots, etc.)

d. Motorbike taxi (ojek) e. Bajaj f.

Taxi

g. Own vehicle (car, motorbike) h. Other (e.g. walking, bicycling, boat, etc.)

33. Around how many percentage of this city’s economy do you think is “informal”?

34. Also in your impression, how many % of citizens in this city use the transport apps (e.g.

Grab, Ojek, Uber, etc.)?

Opinions on Transport and Transport Governance 35. Could you explain to me your organization’s role and tasks? (Overview / introduction) a. As for details if there has been recent action, institutional change, new policy, etc.

36. Are you directly familiar with any drivers’ associations or any trade groups in the transport sector? How would you characterize their working relations with the government (or regulators)?

37. In your opinion, what is the main problem of transport in this city (e.g. traffic jam, traffic accidents, environment, bad service, etc.)? Do you expect improvement? a. If yes, what is the cause of improvement? b. If not, what is the main obstacle?

38. In your opinion, what is the top priority in government’s urban transport policies now?

39. Is there a clear policy (or policies) towards: a. Informal transport (i.e. transport that are not fully regulated or are “gray”), such as ojek, bajaj, etc.? (Are informal transport, still public transport?) b. Is there a clear policy (or policies) towards transport apps? (Are app transport, still public transport?)

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December 2017 40. Overall, who has the main responsibility to provide good transport in this city? Another way to phrase this question is: who is responsible for delivering on the priority? a. City government b. National government c.

Private companies (market mechanism)

d. Citizens themselves (change of perceptions?) e. Other: please explain 41. Suppose ordinary citizens in this city wanted better public transport services. Effective actions ordinary citizens can take are (pick the ones you think are effective): a. Use only good transport services b. Vote in elections c.

Complain to drivers or companies

d. Complain to city or national government e. Follow traffic laws f.

Organize a protest

g. Complain on social media h. Other: please explain 42. On the topic that we discussed, if you had one question you could ask or one thing that you want to know (if you could ask interview questions instead of answering), what would be your question?

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December 2017

Service Organizations and Private Sector Questionnaire Transport Usage Please answer these without thinking too much!

43. Roughly how much, in terms of %, do this city’s citizens depend on the following transportation modes? (This can be very rough, just your personal impression – everyone can have different impressions, though please also let me know if you know there is hard data somewhere.) a. Transjakarta bus rapid transit (BRT) b. Commuter rail (KRL) c.

Buses (KOPAJA, Metromini, Angkots, etc.)

d. Motorbike taxi (ojek) e. Bajaj f.

Taxi

g. Own vehicle (car, motorbike) h. Other (e.g. walking, bicycling, boat, etc.)

44. Around how many percentage of this city’s economy do you think is “informal”?

45. Also in your impression, how many % of citizens in this city use the transport apps (e.g.

Grab, Ojek, Uber, etc.)?

Opinions on Transport, Transport Governance, & Informal Sectors 46. Could you explain to me your organization’s role and tasks? (Overview / introduction) a. As for details if there has been recent action, institutional change, new policy, etc.

47. Are you directly familiar with any drivers’ associations or any trade groups in the transport sector? How would you characterize their working relations with the government (or regulators)? (or other producers’ associations?)

48. In your opinion, what is the main problem of transport in this city (e.g. traffic jam, traffic accidents, environment, bad service, etc.)? Do you expect improvement? a. If yes, what is the cause of improvement? b. If not, what is the main obstacle?

49. In your opinion, what is the top priority of providers now?

50. Is there a clear policy (or policies) towards: a. Informal transport (i.e. transport that are not fully regulated or are “gray”), such as ojek, bajaj, etc.? (Are informal transport, still public transport?) b. Is there a clear policy (or policies) towards transport apps? (Are app transport, still public transport?)

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December 2017 51. Overall, who is the main beneficiary of organized services provided by your constituents?

52. On the topic that we discussed, if you had one question you could ask or one thing that you want to know (if you could ask interview questions instead of answering), what would be your question?

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