In 2004, Ananda Putra Fajar, or Nanda to his family, was among those trying out Jakarta’s newly launched first bus fleet. Jakarta had long been infamous for its traffic congestion and air pollution, and in the search for a solution it had turned to Colombia’s capital, Bogotá, which had developed a system called Bus Rapid Transit, or BRT, a kind of high-concept bus network that has a central spine of frequent, rapid buses with their own infrastructure, which passengers can reach via feeder buses that connect deep into residential areas.
Bogotá had put the system in place a couple of years before: Jakarta’s version was called TransJakarta and initially ran through a 12-kilometre dedicated lane. Now, 19 years later, Nanda has grown to rely on the bus to commute to work, while TransJakarta has grown to become the world’s longest BRT system, spanning more than 251 kilometres (156 miles), with up to 1 million passengers daily, in a city with a population of 11 million.
