Jakarta-bound travellers from eastern Java break toll road traffic record

JASA MARGA - JAKARTA. Jasa Marga, the state-owned toll road operator, counted 167,000 motor vehicles passing through its Cikampek-Jakarta stretch of a key toll road on Sunday, the last day of the weeklong Idul Fitri holiday period.

The company said in a statement released on Monday that that figure marked the highest traffic volume recorded “in Indonesian toll road history”.

The traffic volume on that last holiday was 28 percent higher than the 130,000 cars, buses and trucks recorded on a similar day last year. It was also roughly double the usual 67,000 vehicles passing through the stretch of road each day.

Corporate secretary Agus Setiawan noted in the statement that most vehicles that day had come from Bandung, Cirebon, Semarang, Surakarta and Surabaya, all of which are major cities and popular destinations located eastward of Jakarta.

“We are maximizing the capacity of our toll booths to accommodate the spike in traffic volume. For example, we added 33 payment lanes and 29 mobile [toll card] readers at the Cikampek main toll gate as well as 25 lanes and 29 readers at our Kalihurip main toll gate,” he said.

The company introduced mobile readers during last year’s Idul Fitri holidays. Readers are basically toll road staff positioned around key toll gates, who scan toll cards on handheld devices.

Jasa Marga’s record spike in traffic volume is in line with Transportation Ministry predictions. The ministry predicted that the nationwide number of Idul Fitri travellers would increase 4.14 percent from last year to 22 million this year and that 73.71 percent of the travellers would come from Central, East and West Java.