Ahead of Ramadan traffic chaos, Jakarta’s smart city app adds new transportation features

The Muslim world is anticipating the most important holiday of the year, Eid-al-Fitr, which is the end of the fasting month of Ramadan. In Indonesia, this holiday is called Idul Fitri or Lebaran. It’s expected to fall on July 17 – the exact date depends on the first sighting of the new moon – and Indonesians get several days off work to celebrate. Traditionally, these days are spent with family. For millions of Indonesians living in Jakarta, this means travelling back to their hometowns and villages, a process called mudik.

According to data from Indonesia’s ministry of transportation, some 27.9 million people were on the road last year to return home for the holidays. The figure is expected to be similarly high this year.

The consequence of this temporary mass migration from the cities into the villages is an annual traffic chaos of epic proportions. Indonesians traveling home have to deal with overpriced tickets on jam-packed trains, buses, and planes. Travelers on the road anticipate harrowing traffic jams.

Car-pooling pick-up points

It’s no surprise that Qlue chose this time of year to release a new suite of transportation features. Qlue is a mobile app that a local startup launched last December. It became part of Jakarta’s government-endorsed smart city initiative.

Left: layer showing Transjakarta bus stops and vehicles. Right: Pick-up points for holiday car-pooling.

On top of a Google Maps layer, app users can now see the city’s public bus transportation system, Transjakarta, operating in real-time. All stops are marked in, and labeled buses can be seen traversing their routes.

There are also layers for gas stations, train stations, and meeting points for “mudik bareng” – organized trips to travel home along particular routes as a group.

Traffic reports created on the application Waze are also integrated into Qlue’s transportation map on a separate layer.

Qlue’s co-founder Rama Raditya, who is also behind the enterprise IT firm Terralogiq, tells Tech in Asia that this is only the beginning of Qlue’s expansion of features into the world of transportation.

Promoting buses

In the near future, it plans to integrate the city’s commuter train system, which could prove very helpful because it lets passengers better predict when trains will arrive at a particular station, or if there are significant delays.

A close partnership with the city’s public transportation systems will also help popularize the Qlue app, Raditya says. “We are preparing the advertising assets, posters, etc, as part of the promotion [of Qlue] in busway vehicles and stations,” he said. “This will help socialize busway users to also use Qlue for reporting.”

Beyond offering assistance for transportation needs, Qlue is an app intended for citizen reporting. Users can create complaints by snapping a photo, tagging a location, and adding a comment to it. On the city government’s end, these reports end up on a dashboard where they are assigned to an official to deal with.

Making it sticky