Indonesia's president opens long-awaited subway in the country's capital aimed at staving off crippling traffic gridlock with comfortable transport facilities.
Indonesian President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, center, stands on a stage with the background of a Jakarta Mass Rapid Transit train during the inauguration ceremony of the subway line in Jakarta, Indonesia, Sunday, March 24, 2019. The 16-kilometer line system running south from Jakarta's downtown is the first phase of a development that if fully realized will plant a cross-shaped network of stations on the teeming city of 30 million people.
“Today we will begin a new civilization by operating the first phase of mass rapid transit in Jakarta,” Widodo told several thousand guests and residents at the inauguration. Jakarta’s first subway line, the latest of many infrastructure improvements across the world’s fourth most populous nation, is aimed at helping it catch up with other Southeast Asian capitals such as Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Bangkok in public transport. Jakarta is officially home to about 10 million people, but the population of the greater metropolitan area swells to 30 million.
Congestion has relentlessly worsened in the past decade as car ownership rose, squeezing more and more vehicles onto Jakarta’s unchanging road network. The average peak hour speed has “significantly decreased” to 10 kilometers an hour , according to the transport ministry. It often can take two or more hours to move 5 kilometers in some pockets of the city.
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