Jakarta traffic should be added to life's certainties as death and taxes. It is the first thing that visitors and residents complained and the bad news is it will not go away. The way I see it, there are three things you can do about it: 1. Never leave the house, or 2. Move 3. Accept and deal with it as best as possible. I do not know about you, but I have to go to the office from time to time and I do not plan to move for now. So this week I'll look at some ways you can use technology in your pockets to help manage the mess Jakarta traffic like a pro.
The developed cities have real-time traffic information that is fed into Maps and is conveniently displayed on a beautiful card [photo 1] . Unfortunately, this feature is not available for Jakarta - or maybe it is, but he did not share with anyone so we'll get a little creative. An interesting alternative is to follow the traffic police in Jakarta on . Yes, they have an account and wow. [photo 2] And it works on almost all devices that have an internet connection, too. Just follow @TMCPoldaMetro and prepare for a steady stream of updates in real time from all over Jakarta. As it covers all the capital you have to research your area to see if any of the reports. [photo 3]
The figures are impressive: 350,000 followers and 60,000 tweets since they put this in September 2009. It is in Bahasa indonesia, but customers on native iPhone and other devices has a nice built in "translating" feature that manages to get the point across as well as help you improve your vocabulary. [photo 4]
The second tip is my favorite if you can make it work: CCTV traffic cameras. There are dozens placed throughout the city and when they are online, they are actually quite helpful. There is no native application that I found so you will need to point your mobile browser to www.lewatmana.com - It is hosted locally (and therefore loads quickly even on slow cellular connections) and very user friendly. Just find areas near you and bookmark them to get a bird's eye view of traffic conditions. [photos 5,6,7] Once you get used to these small cameras will save you lots of time and frustration. And I'm always looking for new ways to understand how to avoid the traffic, so if you have another solution just me an email to hanusz@gmail.com and I'll look for a future column.
