The Urban Lawyer’s Brief
In January 2023, a video went viral of a motorcyclist casually riding through the protected bicycle lane on Jalan Jenderal Sudirman — the flagship stretch of cycling infrastructure Jakarta had spent three years and tens of billions of rupiah building. What made the clip newsworthy wasn’t the violation itself, which cyclists in Jakarta see daily. It was the response from the police. Asked about it, a spokesperson for the traffic enforcement division of Polda Metro Jaya said, in effect, that no regulation actually prohibited motorcycles from entering the bike lane.
This was, simply, wrong. Bike To Work Indonesia, the cyclist advocacy group that raised the issue, pointed to the exact provision the police claimed didn’t exist: Article 3 of Gubernatorial Regulation No. 128 of 2019 on the Provision of Bicycle Lanes, which explicitly subjects violations of bike-lane markings and signage to sanctions under the national Traffic Law. The rule was neither obscure nor new. It had been in force since November 2019.
The episode is worth dwelling on, because it captures something more interesting than a single officer’s mistake. It shows a fairly well-constructed legal framework failing not for lack of rules, but because the institutions meant to enforce those rules didn’t know, or didn’t act as though, the rules applied to them.
A Framework Built in Layers
Jakarta’s bicycle lanes rest on a surprisingly coherent legal stack. At the base sits Law No. 22 of 2009 on Traffic and Road Transport, which recognizes cyclists as road users entitled to supporting facilities and obliges motorists to prioritize the safety of pedestrians and cyclists. Above that sits Ministerial Regulation (Permenhub) No. 59 of 2020 on Cyclist Safety, which turns that general entitlement into a concrete obligation: central and regional governments must provide bicycle lanes, equip them with signage and lane markings, and — where a lane shares space with motor vehicles — install physical dividers. And at the local level sits Gubernatorial Regulation No. 128 of 2019, DKI Jakarta’s own instrument establishing which corridors carry protected bicycle lanes and confirming that violations draw sanctions under the national traffic code — a maximum fine of Rp 500,000 or up to two months’ imprisonment under Articles 284 and 287 of the 2009 law.
On paper, this is a complete regulatory chain: a constitutional-adjacent right, a national safety mandate, and a local implementing rule with real penalties attached. Few pieces of urban infrastructure in Jakarta have this much explicit legal backing.
Where the Chain Breaks
And yet, from the moment the pop-up lanes appeared on Sudirman-Thamrin in mid-2020, the pattern has repeated: lanes get built, violations proliferate almost immediately, and enforcement arrives late, inconsistently, or not at all. Within two hours of one early lane’s launch, informal motorcycle parking had returned to it. Sixty police officers were deployed for the initial 63-kilometer enforcement push in late 2019 — a level of resourcing no city can sustain indefinitely on a single piece of infrastructure. By September 2022, the transportation agency and the traffic police were still holding a formal working group merely to agree on how enforcement should even be coordinated between the two institutions.
This is where the bicycle lane story departs from the waste and air pollution cases discussed in earlier columns. Those failures were substantially about capacity — local governments lacking the budget or technical means to comply with a law aimed at them. The bicycle lane failure is different in kind: it is a coordination failure between two separate institutions who each hold a piece of the enforcement authority — Dinas Perhubungan, which builds and marks the lanes, and Polda Metro Jaya, which alone can issue the traffic citations that give the rule teeth. A local transportation agency can paint every lane marking correctly and still have no power to ticket a single violator. Only the police can do that, and the January 2023 incident suggests that even within the police, awareness of the applicable rule cannot be assumed.
The Cost of an Unenforced Law
A regulation that exists but isn’t reliably applied does something worse than nothing: it creates the appearance of protection without the substance of it, encouraging cyclists onto routes that briefly look — and then, at the first motorcycle to cut through, don’t feel — safe. Ridership data aside, the credibility of future infrastructure investment depends on this gap closing. It is difficult to justify the next kilometer of protected lane, or the next planter box separating cyclists from traffic, if the political will to enforce the one already built has visibly wavered.
The fix here is not new legislation. Unlike the waste and air pollution cases, Jakarta’s bicycle lane framework is not thin or outdated — it is, if anything, one of the more precisely drafted pieces of urban mobility regulation the city has. What is missing is an institutional mechanism that survives past a single ministerial working group: a standing, resourced enforcement protocol between the transportation agency and the traffic police, with clear sanction procedures that don’t require a viral video and a public correction from a cycling advocacy group to be remembered.
Indonesian cities do not always need more law to fix urban problems. Sometimes they need the institutions holding the law already on the books to agree, consistently, on the fact that it exists.
— Farid Hanggawan
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