Bike to Work and School day in Jogjakarta, Indonesia

The City of Jogjakarta has proven to be one of the leading Cities in Indonesia in promoting the utilitarian use of bicycles among its residents. Now, the City carries out a weekly campaign to promote bicycle use for school and work trips. Every Friday morning at 7 o’clock, the City Mayor leads a 15 km Segosegawe bike tour in the city with an increasing number of participants. This weekly bicycle campaign, which is in short known as Segosegawe is an abbreviation of the local Javanese language for Sepeda nganggo sekolah and nyambut gawe which means “bike to school and to work”. The former Mayor of Bogota, Mr. Enrique Penalosa, GTZ’s Dino Teddyputra and ADB’s Yan Zhong participated at the Segosegawe bike campaign last Friday.

Together with the Mayor and Vice Mayor of the City, Mr. Penalosa gave an encouraging speech that was received cheerfully by the participating cyclists whose number was estimated to be 6000-7000 in total. The City Mayor told GTZ that this campaign has been going on since several months and that he expects it would take 3 years to have cycling be widely accepted as a serious means of transport among the residents in his city. To support this agenda, the City is also in the process of planning bikeways throughout its neighborhoods. To complement this plan, Mr. Ritzky of the TransJogja bus system told GTZ that they are planning to equip the buses with bikeracks which would enable multimodal integration between bicycle and bus to assist people in overcoming longer travel distances.

Furthermore, the Vice Mayor of the City has also expressed his interest to revive the pedestrianization plan for the city’s busiest street Jl. Malioboro. He requested GTZ assistance to help create a more comprehensive plan that also addresses the social impacts as well as the impacts on the businesses that are affected so that this time, a feasible pedestrianization plan can be realized.

 

 

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