Are we there yet?

“Are we there yet?”, words that we hear everyday in our life because of traffic. Traffic happens because of the usage of private cars that everyday increases. Yet, people don’t realize what is the cause. The traffic makes cars stop and waste lots of fuel and pollute the air. We should realize that there are many alternatives than using our own private car, like we can use Public Transportation. Public transportation may not be as good as the public transportation in developed countries, But because of the problems we have, public transportation must be developed because by reducing the car usage we will reduce the traffic and pollution. Using public transportation can reduce traffic because in Jakarta, 30% of people use public transportation and the other 70% uses their own car or motorcycle. If you see on streets the percentage is correct and most people use their own car or motorcycles to the places they want to go. One of the resources even stated that Jakarta is one of the most populated city with 346.92 traffic per-day. Jakarta also is estimated to lose $1 billion yearly due to traffic. The money that we can use to repair streets, making shelters, community colleges are used due to traffic. Most of the estimation websites said that, there are around 1.5 million vehicles (Cars, Motorcycles etc) on Jakarta’s streets each day but the road capacity is for only 1 million vehicles. Less than 8 percent of those vehicles are for public transportation, the disturbing fact is that one large public bus filled with passengers would remove 30 privately owned cars from the road. The growth rate of Jakarta roads is 0.9% a year, but vehicle growth is 9%, so by 2014 there will too much traffic unless something is done.Another reason is that less cars means less pollution. These days, people don’t realize that pollution creates global warming. The issue of global warming is getting worse day by day. The air pollution in Jakarta is really high, it reaches the 89.91 on the estimation experts website. In this city, the researches estimate that due to travelling to work/school, per passenger is produces yearly 3,766.56kg of CO₂. It is needed 43.91 trees for each passenger to produce enough oxygen to cover the pollution each person has made. Can you imagine how much oxygen from trees is needed to cover 237,424,363 people in Indonesia?Some people claim that “Public transportation is not comfortable enough”. For me, yes it is, but the government is trying to fix the public transportation so it can be more comfortable and people will eventually start to use the public transportation rather than using their own cars. The public transportation can be comfortable if we as citizens keep everything clean and throw rubbish in the right place. However, not only the citizens can keep the public transportation clean, also the government. The government will repair the facilities that will satisfy us.

Although there are some objections about using public transportation, the facts above show that public transportation is not that bad after all. We need to start thinking about the future, if we don’t start to reduce the car usage, what will happen to the next generation? We also actually already know about the consequences. Therefore, use public transportation for healthy and safe environment.