Promotion of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) in a Large City : A Case Study of Yogyakarta <Research Note>

Public transportation such as Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) is a bus-based mass transit system that delivers fast, comfortable, and cost-effective urban mobility. Nowdays, Yogyakarta has set up BRT lines to decrease the use of private vehicles and to promote clean city transport. BRT cannot be operated when there is no cooperation among all the institutions for the rearrangement of transfer lines. Thus, local governments need to take appropriate step that is acceptable for all parties, for example, by using participatory approach. This method involves society and various parties in the city and the result can form the basis of support for the decision making of local governments. Similarly, efforts to change habits of those who are habituated to use private vehicles can be difficult when they have to switch to public transportation modes. However, if the government uses the participatory approach to convince them that the BRT can replace private vehicles by providing convenient and more efficient services, it is expected that lock-in effect will be minimized. Special efforts are needed to change people's perspectives through public campaigns and dissemination programs. We focus on two problems as the cases of study, and propose possible participatory methods for solving the problems. In order to harmonize BRT with other modes of public transportation such as angkot, ojek, becak that might get displaced by BRT, alternative modes can be operated in the feeder routes for collecting passengers up to BRT route. For this case study, meetings among the institutions, street drama, and workshops have been proposed as the possible tools of participatory approaches. Another case study is how to motivate motorbike users to shift to BRT once it is implemented. This will be possible by organizing public campaigns and information dissemination. For this purpose, use of mass media, face to face interactions, and questionnaire survey have been proposed as the suitable participatory tools.

Moreover, we propose to use informal leaders as a medium to address the public in all the participatory approaches in order to convince their followers to adopt BRT as their mode of transportation.