The Case of Jakarta: A City with an Isolated Bus Rapid Transit: formulating a design strategy to establish an integrated transit oriented development in Jakarta using the existing bus rapid transit system

Jakarta is the capital of Indonesia, a developed country in the Southeast Asia. With the population of 23 million, Jakarta and the surrounding area is the 4th largest urban area in the world. As the result, Jakarta suffers from inadequate facility such as severe traffic jams caused by too much commuting from areas around Jakarta, and air pollution caused by the traffic. The newly proposed Jakarta Mass Transit System has created an opportunity to the city’s mobility. The system has just been implemented, not completed yet, but is already working. The system will be finished in 2015 completing the whole Jakarta Mass Rapid Transit System. There is an opportunity to reintegrate the unconnected area in the city center. Since 2004, the TransJakarta Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), part of the Jakarta MRT, has been implemented in Jakarta. However, there is no in-depth research on how the Mass Transit System’s affect the vitality of the city. Currently, the BRT only solves the problem of infrastructure, that is the congestion problem. There is no integration between the BRT network and the urban fabric. There is an opportunity to implement a more sustainable transport mode but there is no guideline to direct the system to this direction. Around the world, large cities started to implement sustainable mobility in their city’s building project. Transit-oriented Development in the United States and cities such as Bogota, Zurich, Singapore are one of the many examples of an integrated transport mode or transit-oriented development. Jakarta is late on the idea of integration between the urban fabric and a transportation network and hasn’t consider the possibility of implementing a TOD on the existing MRT/BRT. With this vision of sustainable mobility kept in mind, and with the author’s concern on the environment and the ever increasing use of private automobiles, the author tries to research on the possibility of integrating the BRT system with the urban fabric to create a more sustainable transport mode by implementing a concept of TOD. Unique in this research is that the author is using space syntax as a method of approach to investigate the level of integration of an area next to a BRT system and the use of research by design to investigate improved urban design in the areas surrounding the stops of the BRT system. For this reason, the author decided to choose this topic for the thesis project.UrbanismArchitectur