Census figures unreliable, are Jakarta and Java are much less populated than is thought?
An Unreliable Census?
I’m a few years now in this interesting land, so I hope some credibility can be given to my possibily seditious ramblings to follow. Mainly, I don’t believe there are over 140 million people residing on beautiful Java.
Evidence…….well let’s start in Jakarta which I lived in for about a year. Traffic in the ‘Big Durian’ is undeniably horrendous during the rush hour. But this city is in my opinion a disaster in terms of urban planning and surfeit of anywhere approaching an adequate transport infrastructure.
North-south this city requires to at least treble the current main arterial routes it currently has, at present all traffic is filtered into Jalan Sudirman/Gatot Subroto. Which is equivalent to a one horse town in my opinion.
The “jalan tikus” rat-runs only allow a temporary escape from this trapped pipe of road rage/numbing boredom. Manhattan has 11-13 equivalent routes bi-secting its narrow frame. What’s more it’s so difficult to get off these choked arterials, also added to the mix is a lack of overhead routes for those wishing to get from east-west across it, which means that an east-west journey of one mile “as the crow flies” can end up being 6 miles with an enforced detour via Semanggi roundabout.
There’s no train network to offer relief, then there’s bus-ways clogging up much of the limited viable road space, with the effect that Indonesia’s capital feels much more crowded then it actually is.
More evidence, is the fact that nearly all of Jakarta is a low rise city of bungalows with decent size gardens to the fore and back. These are residents of the middle classes not the wealthy, who have pitched half acre plots in Menteng/Pluit/Kelapa Gading and much of South Jakarta.
Yet more evidence comes from Menteng which I once got lost in at 9.00 at night and had to drive around for 15 mins to find a pedestrian to point me in the right direction. So where in Jakarta do the huge swarming mass that keep the corrupt awake reside?
Muara Angke is possibly Jakarta’s most famous slum, and its tiny, no way there’s more than 30,000 people there. The railway lines and the adjacent humble abodes are shockingly thronged with humanity, but apart from one area near Senen, there is no great mass of people here. The back streets of Kota can be heavily populated, but look at the larger houses adjacent to the narrow laneways. Sorry but parts of London/NY feel as populated to me.
I could go on and on….but what I’m saying is that the population of Jakarta and maybe much of western Java which I am also familiar with is wrong.
My clinching evidence that the census is an unreliable reading is that my friend was counted three times. Once in Depok, where she formerly lived – confirmed by her brother still living there, then in Palu, Central Sulawesi, where she had returned to assist her dying mother as confirmed by her father, and now in Manado where she has been resident for three months.
I can go on and on mentioning more examples of people who told me they were double counted, and analysing small towns in Java that supposedly have populations of two million in their hinterlands, but I’ll leave my last example to Banten and its 9-10 million residents.
Banten supposedly has about 9 million residents north of the railway line to Rangkasbitung – there are not a million people resident south of this railway line, with much of the area given over to the dwindling Javan Badak and threatened Badui people. Thus that area to the north, roughly the size of greater London, but mainly made up of farms and coastal paddies, has the same population as one of the western world’s most congested cities. Sorry can’t believe there are that many people in Tangerang and Serpong.
Sorry I don’t buy the population of western Java; and feel its deliberately distorted. If I’m right why would a legitimate government allow this practice, deliberate misleading?
Jakarta OverPopulation? is brought to you by Indonesia Matters, where you can book domestic flights in Indonesia, and features listings of Indonesia hotels, like Kuta hotels, Ubud hotels, hotels in Jakarta, and more.
