Age Limits Among Car Ownership Limits Urged for Jakarta

Age Limits Among Car Ownership Limits Urged for Jakarta

By Hotman Siregar on 9:40 pm September 26, 2013.
A transportation analyst has urged the Jakarta authorities to impose a limit on the age of vehicles allowed on the streets, in a bid to both reduce exhaust emissions and cut back on car use. Yoga Adiwinarto, the director of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy, said on Wednesday that the idea had long been discussed by city officials but never implemented.“Other big cities across the world have implemented such a policy,” he said, citing the example of Singapore, where higher taxes on cars older than five years are credited with keeping the number of these vehicles at a minimum.

“[In] Jakarta, it doesn’t have to be five years. 10 years would be good enough. Old cars should no longer eligible to operate in big cities,” Yoga said.

A similar policy in the United States offers car owners an incentive to scrap their old cars. In some states, they can get the equivalent of Rp 25 million ($2,180) per metric ton for getting their old cars scrapped.

In addition, the US government earns up to Rp 110 trillion annually from exporting scrap metal from such cars.

Yoga pointed to stringent car ownership rules in Japan as something else Jakarta could emulate.

“There’s no need to limit the number of cars people can own, but the government should limit their use. These days, people have cars without [even] having a garage [to park them],” he said, noting that in Japan, people were required to first own a garage before being eligible to buy a car.

Yoga’s remarks came in response to an announcement earlier this week by Jakarta Deputy Governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama that the city administration planned to take all privately registered vehicles more than 10 years old off the streets.

“A plan is being assessed to see whether cars that are more than 10 years old should be sold to other cities or scrapped,” Basuki said on Monday.

He said the assessment was important because the need for cheap vehicles remained high in regions outside Jakarta, and especially outside the island of Java.

Basuki said the Singapore government had implemented a scrapping scheme for old cars because it had nowhere to put them.

The administration of Governor Joko Widodo has made cutting back private vehicle ownership a cornerstone of its effort to tackle the capital’s chronic traffic congestion.

The city plans to roll out an electronic road pricing scheme, among other measures, some time next year that will make it prohibitively expensive for people to drive into downtown Jakarta.

However, the administration says its efforts will be set back by the central government’s recently launched low-cost green car policy that makes cheap cars widely available.