Why do I even wish to move abroad anyways?
This is just a rant on Tangerang suburbs by one of its citizens
This is a developing piece, as I’d like views from people who have experience working or studying abroad (and Indonesia to make a better comparison). I’m gonna ask some friends later.
Update: who the hell am i kidding im too lazy to update stuff
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I was wondering why do I have this wish to move abroad. What’s wrong with Tangerang? It has got pretty much anything you want.
I have got preferences though. I’d like to move to somewhere in Europe (and UK) where I can survive just speaking English, maybe Singapore where it should be easier for my parents to settle, or Japan but I can’t survive off English there.
I’ve never studied nor worked abroad. So this is still very much a dream with little experience to back it up. But I do have a general theme in my considerations whether to (dream of) move to another country or not.
It’s the dependence on public transport, the reliance on cars, and how fun would it would be to just walk around and stroll around the place.
I generally love places where even just walking around is a pleasant experience. I’m also not really fond of driving.
A good example for a walkable places, from the lens of an Indonesian suburbanite, would be Singapore, Dutch (never been there but I saw on Youtube they are very stellar for pedestrians), and Japan, among many others.
But first, why do I feel the need to move just to experience that? What’s the difference with Indonesian cities in general?
The Island-River Analogy
For a little context, I live in Tangerang. It’s a district/town (I’m not so clear on the terminology) right on the west edge of Jakarta. It is part of the ‘Greater Jakarta’ area I guess. Since we are on the fringes, and we are not as densely populated as Jakarta, I assume it’s safe to call Tangerang a suburban district. See I’m playing it very very loose on the definition of a suburb.
Also, the place I’m going to talk about are mostly BSD, Gading Serpong, and Alam Sutra. These are all areas where it is pretty much managed by private developers. I’ll just call these areas privately developed areas (PDAs). And thus might not reflect the urban design language of the Indonesian government.
I believe these PDAs are built like a collection of islands on a river. The ‘river’ here represents the roads, and the islands represents either housing areas or commercial areas. To traverse the ‘river’ you would need a boat. Technically you can swim but it wouldn’t be wise. The ‘boat’ here being a car/motorbike.
So for example. You live in one such housing complex (gated communities) in Suburban Jakarta. Where does one go in a day in the life of a suburbanite?
- You want to go shopping? Hop on a car to the nearest supermarket
- Your kids need to go to a nearby school? Hop on a car and drive them there
- You need a hair cut? Hop on a car and go the a nearby barbershop.
- Let’s eat out! Again, hop on a car and go to a nearby restaurant
See a lot of things depend on the existence of the automobile! If you don’t have a car, at least get a motorcycle. And just replace the word car to motorcycle from the points above. It is very rare to hear “alright let’s just walk there” or “we can take public transport there” in Tangerang.
That, or use GoCar or other ride hailing services. But they are all adding cars/bikes to the road.
Back to my island and river analogy. I’ll add that usually, the residential areas are jam-packed together, separate from commercial/business districts. To go from residential areas into commercial districts you’d require, guess again, a car/motorbike.
This is understandable though. I haven’t asked a lot of people. But I imagine people would like to keep it this way because they want their residential areas to be peaceful and quiet. Far from the hustle and bustle of a commercial district. Developers understands this. And they build accordingly. This is just like when you are playing SimCity, you put a plot of land as residential areas on one side, and on the other side you put the commercial district. The game then will inform you that commercial district will emit ‘noise pollution’ that may negatively affect the happiness of nearby residents and the land value of nearby residential areas.
Try to compare it to suburbs in Japan for example. Take a look at this dude’s video:
In the video, Greg (the channel owner) compares Canadian suburbs which uses single use zoning and Japan’s….kinda mixed use zoning.
Single use zoning means that the government establishes that a particular plot of land can only be used for one purpose only. In this case, low rise residential areas. This means you are not allowed to build apartments, minimarkets, arts and crafts hobby shop, etc. Only houses!
While mixed use zoning allows a combination of use. Which is why you can find a clinic in the middle of a residential area. I remember things like this when I live in an older neighborhood though. I can find mom and pop stores (toko kelontong) in a residential area in Tangerang during the early 2000s. I don’t think you can find any of those in newer residential areas. I think some residential areas explicitly bans business use inside residential areas.
You can also notice that the streets in Japanese residential areas are pretty cramped. Definitely not built for a lot of car traffic. Instead, pedestrian rules the street. For our middle class Indonesian standard, that would be bad right? How do people get around then? The street is way to small!
OK so maybe the argument that living not near a commercial district is pretty sound. Noise pollution does indeed have adverse effect to our health. A mom and pop store should be okay, but not living smack dab in the middle of a commercial district.
So separating residential and commercial district is not really much of a problem. Unless we make it difficult to get from one to another.
Road and Street Design
This is my main gripe about the island/river styled development. I believe it is designed to be traversed by cars and motorbikes only. Other modes of transport may very well fuck off.
I’ll give you and example here. I was trying to go to Subway (the sandwich, not trains subway, we don’t have those in Tangerang) and buy some for me and my mom.
Oh it’s not even 1 kilometer! I can just cycle there. Easy work.
Not.
Yes I did went against the traffic flow. But I did that because it is very difficult to cross the street on a bike. I don’t want to cross the street too much while on a bike. Seeing as it’s pretty dangerous to do so.
You can see the streets are pretty wide. Perfect for cars. Wider streets made it easier for cars to travel at higher speed. So travel at higher speed they did, which makes it dangerous to anyone not in a car.
Also you can see we actually have bike lanes, that is, if you can see the fading white line. Even having a bike lane is nice, but you can see that it’s actually just a side of the road slapped with a white marking. The bike line is more of an afterthought, after the developer finished building the street for cars, they thought eh maybe it’d be nice to have a bike lane and slapped some white line.
A little bit more example here:
You see the left lane, that half-a-lane? Suddenly there is a bike lane slapped on? That really shows that the bike lane is really just an afterthought. In reality, more people use it as parking or street vendors selling snacks rather than bikes going from point A to B. This is effectively a one-lane road.
Of course one can always argue that cyclist should just get better at traversing such traffic. But that’s not ideal isn’t it? In an ideal world you can let your kid who’s still in junior high to buy Subway sandwiches for the family by bike. However, with streets like shown above, we really can’t, can we?
The dependence on cars might also affect the degree of freedom/safety your kids will enjoy. Ideally you can drive once you get your driving license when you are 17 at the soonest. Before that (that is, during elementary through half of senior high school years) kids are not really supposed to drive. What if the kids want to hang out with their friends at a nearby Subway? Well, either you as the parents drive them, you let the drive underaged (you are not supposed to allow them), or they can try to walk or bike there.
For some parents, letting your children walk or bike within certain areas might be cool. These kids will enjoy a greater degree of freedom growing up. But there are also some parents who we may say relatively more protective than the others, and will not allow their kids to walk or bike along the less than ideal pathways. Hence will drive them to wherever they want to go. This will result in lesser degree of freedom enjoyed by the child. What effect this will have on the child in the future? One can only speculate.
Oh before you all get mad. The cycling I’m talking about is as a means to get from point A to point B. Not the fancy hundred million rupiah fast bicycle for sport. I’m talking normal human here.
So at least in Gading Serpong (which should be quite similar other privately developed areas) the streets are wide, cars go fast, anyone not inside a car or on a motorbike would have a rough time. Which is why we default to cars/motorbikes. Riding a bike or walking to Subway would be too much of a hassle. The crossings are quite dangerous, it’s hot, and there not really a proper path to cycle/walk on.
This kind of street/road design I believe contributes to the island/river analogy. If you are not inside a car or on a bike, these areas can seem disjointed, not interconnected. Still following the island/river analogy, there are no bridges. You’d need a boat even for short distances.
Prevalence of Shop Houses (Ruko) as Commercial District
OK so we don’t have mom and pop stores. But in newer development, we usually have what we call “ruko”/shophouses. I’m talking about this:
These are mid rise (if we can call it that) buildings usually meant for business use. Theoretically you can have a shop at the lower floor and live on the 2nd or 3rd floor, but I don’t think much people are doing that in Greater Jakarta area. These buildings are the main use of commercial areas in the suburbs, apart from the occasional gigantic shopping malls.
Shophouses are designed for easy access with cars. It’s usually a compound with their own parking lot. You can just park in front of the shop you actually want to visit, get out of the car, and instantly get inside the shop. In a way, it is kind of similar to what North Americans call ‘strip malls’ I guess? Only that strip malls are usually not multi-storied.
As beautifully put by City Beautiful, the North American strip malls are an efficient land use which covers convenience, car culture, and capitalism. Often, shop houses are built parallel along the street. This helps with visibility as people driver along the road can quickly scan what shops are there.
Shophouses, are actually very efficient! However this causes another issue at least for me. Since they are built as such that they show the building and the parking up front, it is clear that this place is designed for cars. There are not really easy access if you don’t have a car or a motorbike to shophouses, unless you live right behind them.
Often, shophouses are built in such way that it conceals the residential area within like this:
When it’s near, you may be able to just walk or bike there. But remember even a less than 1km ride here could be dangerous. But these shophouses are usually losing to larger shopping malls, though.
For example if I were to visit one of the shops in the shophouses, I too would need to hop on a car and drive. As there is no easy way to access these commercial districts other than cars/motorbikes.
Also another personal opinion, I think shophouses are better suited for stores with more specific purposes. Such as an electrical component store, hardware store, tailors, or the very least a restaurant. These are places that usually gets visited because people already had a plan to go there before even leaving a house. It’d be quite harder for stores relying to convert existing foot traffic into customers such as clothing store, snacks, and other store you commonly find in malls and is more of a window-shopping destination. This is because shophouses are not exactly activity centers. It’s more like a place where people drop in, do what they intend to do there, and get out. Clothing and accessories stores may thrive in malls because they get foot traffic within the building and people on foot may consider it quite easy to casually drop in and look around a bit. This is not so with shophouses where you got to do some extra steps of going to the car, turning it on, getting out of the parking, and just…drive around the shop house complex before parking near a shop they are interested in.
The point being, shophouses are better for stores with specific purpose and they do not create foot traffic/activity.
Little to no Public Transport
In Jakarta, we have a somewhat functioning public transport.
We have a commuter line train, a bus system (Transjakarta) which covers quite a lot, and you can also use other buses or angkots (I’m not so familiar with these, think of them as mini bus, they are using smaller passenger cars as a bus).
However if you live in the suburb, your options are quite limited. There are train stations/bus stops, but these are usually sparsely located and just used to travel into Jakarta. So you can go from Tangerang to Jakarta using trains and bus, but not really from somewhere in Tangerang, into another place in Tangerang.
Combined with the other previously mentioned points, no public transport and not exactly bike and pedestrian friendly just adds to the car-centric-ness of the suburbs.
So what?
OK you know what. Maybe I just need a holiday. We are already accustomed to this way of living anyways. Once you get used to it (and if you have a car/motorbike, which most people have nowadays) it’s actually quite nice. Everything you need is within a short-ish car trip (< 30 mins). People from other countries may balk at this but this is what we have grown accustomed to.
I guess my whole point was it’s just not comfortable to not having a car nowadays. A car is expensive, it’s really an expense with little return. Ideally, I don’t want to buy a car if I don’t have to. However nowadays it’s quite difficult to not own one. At the same time, it’s increasingly difficult to (wisely) afford one. The suburbs are built like island/river. Getting to one place to another pretty much require a car. Alternatives are not really available. You NEED a car here.
But I guess that’s just Indonesia, or even, just a small subset of Indonesian life. I actually want to hear from other perspective. Namely how do one get around in the place where they live or even better, a place they once lived in? Such as:
- going to the nearest public transit station
- kids going to school
- shopping for groceries
- eating out
- other mundane activities
- If it’s not Indonesia, how does it compare? For example: If you used to study in the Netherlands, how does getting around compare with Indonesia?
I want to know how easy it is to get around in different places! I assume different people living in the same area might have different ways of getting around too though. Even different perspective within Indonesia. My perspective is those of a suburbanite. Mileage may vary especially for friends living in Jakarta, the downtown, or even a different suburb.
Known Comparisons
We can find a lot of things on the internet. In this case, even though nothing beats a first hand account, we can look up how people live and move themselves throughout the day in various countries just by hopping on Youtube (such as, Life Where I’m From for Japan, Not Just Bikes for the Netherlands, City Beautiful for cities in general with US as example).
For now this is what I have:
- In the Netherlands (at least in some of their cities), it looks like a pedestrian/bicycle first environment. You can do anything and move anywhere with a bike as long as you are fit enough. Unless you are buying a sofa. You’d need something bigger.
- In Japan, it also looks like in some places at least you can walk and cycle comfortably. The streets are usually small unless you are at the main roads. Kids walk around freely in most neighborhoods with little fear of very fast expensive iron and steel coffins.
- In the US, it doesn’t look particularly pedestrian friendly. It looks like a very car-first environment. Something I can see here too. The suburbs looks more isolated from the rest of activity/commercial centers.
I hope to one day be able to experience different ‘day in the life’(s) of people in different places.
