The Affordability of Urban Transportation for Low Income Population: The Case of Bandung

(Keterjangkauan Masyarakat Terhadap Transportasi Perkotaan)

Audi Oetomo, Ir., M.P1

Abstrak

This research examines the affordability of urban transportation for low income population in Bandung to have access to their work places, schools, and health service facilities. This issue is crucial, because the continuing Indonesia’s economic crisis, which happened since 1997, has lowered population income and increased urban transportation costs.
We use mix approaches to undertake this research. We do secondary data survey to find out the characteristics of low income urban population and urban transportation in Bandung. From this survey, we came up with a conclusion that spending of low income population is the most appropriate variable to approach the affordability of urban transportation. With this approach, we do survey research using 150 samples -taken by the BPS from 15 census blocks using proportional simple random sampling- to examine whether the low income population in the city can or cannot afford their urban transportation costs. We examine the consequences when they can or cannot do so, as well. We also analyze the answers of the respondents to find the explanation and identify the population characteristics behind different group of cases.
We found that 79.3 percent of low income population in Bandung cannot afford their urban transportation costs based on their monthly spending of their owned income. Nevertheless, they understand the importance of having access to their work places, schools, and health service facilities for their future better quality of life; and therefore they continue to use the urban transportation funded with their personal savings (89.9 percent), asking aid from their relatives or friends (5 percent), or borrowing money from others (5 percent).
Furthermore, 42.9 percent of those who cannot afford their urban transportation costs have reduced some components of their spending for living such as for food, recreation, health care,education, and shopping. In some cases, they stop using urban transportation to persist their three basic activities, thus they go by walk to their work places, schools, or health service facilities.
This provides significant insights for policy analysists and policy makers in order to make effective and efficient urban transportation policy for low income city population, especialy in the era of continuing economic crisis.

Keywords: affordability, urban transportation, low income local population, three basic human activities.