Inland waterways transport development in the Kapuas River, Indonesia

Indonesia as a maritime country are mostly composed of river, sea and lake which have great potential of waterway transport modes. One of them is the Kapuas River in West Kalimantan Province, which is the longest river in Indonesia. This river has an important role in social and economic activities of the surrounding community, especially in transporting cargo and passenger. However, due to the lack of government attention and no adequate standard and regulation, the inland waterway operation is not running optimally. Safety issue becomes one of the main problems which eventually led to delays in the freight transport. Therefore, this study is an initial research to determine the potential and problems and provide the solutions in order to optimize the inland waterway transport in the Kapuas River. This study identifies potential and problems of waterway transport in the Kapuas River based on two aspects, there are demand market and technical aspect. Market assessment includes an analysis of future development plans, vessel traffic and throughput forecasting where will affect the waterway capacity in the future. The major commodities in the West Kalimantan are a CPO, bauxite (alumina) and containerized cargo. For technical assessment, waterway parameter of the current physical condition of the river is analyzed by several theoretical and practical approaches. Currently, the depth of Kapuas River varies with the average minimum depth between 2 m to 5 m which the upstream section has shallower depth than the downstream. The maximum vessel that can be accommodated by a waterway or also known as reference vessel is used as a design criteria to determine the critical locations in each section. Bottleneck analysis focused on analyzing the bend, bridge and junction per section which they are categorized into three based on the eligibility of design criteria, i.e. Red, Yellow and Green. The result shows around 30% of the total critical points is a bend with a small radius curve, or categorized as Red and Yellow bottleneck. Waterway capacity, which are influenced by the aspect of waterway infrastructure, traffic and fleet characteristics, is used to determine the right solution of current problems and the near future. This study provides the recommendation solutions which are divided into three phases. Stage 1 aims to standardize and stabilize the basic operations of inland waterway transport, so that the solution has focused on soft infrastructure improvement. While for the Stage 2 and Stage 3, the hard infrastructure improvement has an important role to optimize the capacity and upgrade the profile and class of the waterway