Motorbike-taxi-drivers as Infrastructure in the Indonesian City

THE LIMITS OF INFRASTRUCTURE: Public Transport in a Post‐colonial City

“…Rapid population growth on the urban fringe occurred during this time ( SDA , 1995: 74; 2021: 48) alongside a barely expanding road network ( SDA , 1998: 289; 2010: 337; 2021: 235) and a huge increase in private motorbikes from 390 thousand to 1.7 million ( SDA , 1995: 330; 2018: 320). With the collapse of the tram, bus and minibus systems and a poor road network, the motorbike became an efficient short to medium distance taxi that relied on kampung men repurposing themselves, their motorbikes, their workplaces and their smartphones into an adaptable passenger transport system (see Frey, 2020; Peters, 2020).…”

“…By 2015, the motorbike‐taxi drivers who operate on these platforms were providing most of the non‐private intra‐city commuter transport in Indonesia. Although they were an intractable part of the urban economy, Indonesia's transport minister considered both them and the roadside repairmen who supported them as a necessary evil that filled only a short‐term infrastructure gap until the proposed heavy transport infrastructure projects—costing almost three hundred billion US dollars—were completed (see Ray and Ing, 2016; Peters, 2020: 483; World Highways , 2020). When Indonesia's current president, Joko Widodo, took office in 2014, he promised to repeal the massive and long‐standing petrol subsidy and use it to fund these transport infrastructure projects (Davidson, 2018: 45), but the projects have fallen well short of meeting commuter demand.…”

“…When away from the cafés, they communicate through end‐to‐end encrypted platforms like WhatsApp to circulate instructions on how to manipulate smartphones to misrepresent GPS locations, use fake identities or cancel ride‐hailing orders without being penalized. These now widely reported tactics evidence a worldwide trend of taxi drivers asserting a right to manipulate ride‐hailing software and claw back advantage from the ride‐hailing companies that make it available to them and regulate how they must use it (Chen, 2018; Frost, 2019; Rosenblat, 2019; Frey, 2020; Peters, 2020; Sadowski, 2020; Van Doon and Badger, 2020; Mustika, and Savirani, 2021). This manipulation of ride‐hailing software is the same as the repurposing of factory parts and labour and the siphoning of subsidized fuel.…”

Profesionalisme Driver Transportasi Online

“…Driver menyiapkan kendaraan bermotor sedangkan perusahan memiliki aplikasi dan prosedur (Abidin, 2018). Pekerjaan driver transportasi online dianggap lebih bergengsi daripada menjadi driver konvensional (Peters, 2018).…”

The Anthropologist as a City Bus Driver: Researching Urban Transport Using Autoethnography

“…In addition to automobilities research (Dawson 2017) or cultures of motorways research (Kuligowski and Stanisz 2016), this professional group, not surprisingly, is of considerable interest to many academic disciplines worldwide (see Tse et al 2006). Despite the considerable amount of literature, there is an absence of work focused on the culture of city bus drivers when compared to the literature on bikers (Schmid 2021), truckers (Lamut 2009), or taxi and autorickshaw drivers (Chowdhury 2021;Peters 2020), although urban transport and mobility can certainly be studied from the perspective of social and cultural anthropology. Anthropology has the potential to offer rich research findings from daily life, as in the study examining actors on urban public transport in Zagreb and Split that categorizes individual groups of passengers (Tomić et al 2015), or the study documenting the environment of bus transport not only as a means of relocation, but also as a cross-cultural meeting place (Koefoed et al 2017).…”