Does the bus rapid transit reduce motorcycle use? Evidence from the Jakarta metropolitan area, Indonesia

Abstract

Countries of lower average income, higher population density, and higher level of urbanization tend to have higher motorcycle ownership levels. Motorcycles bring safety and environmental challenges to Global South cities. The Jakarta metropolitan area in Indonesia adopted bus rapid transit (BRT) in 2004, but motorcycle ownership growth continued since. This empirical study examines what predicted motorcycle use in 2018, fourteen years after the opening of the BRT system TransJakarta, with particular attention paid to the potential impacts of the BRT on motorcycle use. It contributes to the understanding of high-capacity transit’s impacts on motorcycle travel in a Global South context. It tested literature review-based hypotheses with multinomial logit and left-censored tobit models predicting mode choice among motorcycle-based and bus-based modes as well as trip distance of motorcycle-based modes. The main dataset analyzed in this research contains 4,978 commuting-to-the-office first-leg trips. Model results suggested: proximity to the BRT is associated with office commute mode choice preference of the BRT over both motorcycle-based modes controlling for poverty rate, population density, and trip distance, and the effect is stronger on private motorcycles; similarly, proximity to the BRT is associated with reduced office commute trip distance in trips made by both motorcycle-based modes controlling for poverty rate and population density, and the effect is stronger on private motorcycles; village-level poverty rate is positively associated, and village-level population density is negatively associated, with private motorcycle trip distance. Such findings are generally in line with the literature. As the modal share of BRT is still low, transport policies in motorcycle-stressed cities with BRT could promote transit ridership by raising the relative costs of using private motorcycles such as parking costs, reducing the relative travel time of the BRT by increasing frequency and speeds, and improving the user-friendliness of first mile and last-mile trips connecting the BRT.