High Fuel Price: Will Indonesian Shift to Public Transportation

摘要

Public transportation has been declining over years, while on the other hand, private vehicles are dramatically increasing. The share of public transportation was 38.3% in 2002 and slowly decreasing to 12.9% in 2010. Cheap fuel price has been alleged to be the main cause for the increased private vehicles. The declining trend of public transportation needs further investigation whether higher fuel price indeed influences the choice of transportation mode. The present study therefore aims at exploring the preference of using public transportation compared to motorcycle and private car for various fuel price and identifying barriers toward public transportation. A survey was conducted in 2013 to capture the preference of each transportation mode given different fuel price. A questionnaire which was designed according to the structure of Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) was distributed using random sampling in ten cities in Sumatra and Java islands, Indonesia. Results indicate that the increased fuel price would not lead to significant increase of public transportation users. Motorcycle seems continuously being the dominating transportation mode in the future. On the other hand, issues resulted from limited public transportation capacity such as long travel time, security and safety issues, limited route, poor schedule appear to be the most barriers of using public transportation. It is implied that in order to promote public transportation, interventions should be introduced simultaneously at both supply (i.e., increasing public transportation capacity) and demand (i.e., high fuel price) sides. Limitations of the study are also discussed.